On frozen nights the heart finds its own warmth; it is a hard thing at times, unyielding and immutable. Often it is a thing lacking in the romance of soft feelings, cuddles, and cooing whispers of pillow-talk and senseless baby-prattle. The heart’s warmth is pragmatic and predatory. The heart—as we know it—is a hungry animal, driven by instinct and need. In this way, the heart is pure and without pretense. This is a thing that I learned from you. Do you remember teaching me? We sat alone, talking of things important only to ourselves. In this way, our talk bore the relevance of hyena-noise, and the poetry of incoherence. We solved no grand mysteries; we confronted nothing more substantial than our own improvised assertions and agreements. Our profundity was nonsense. It was cold. You were honest. I was honest. You were afraid. I was indifferent. Not to you, my dear, never to you but to the senseless demands burdened on you. You owe nothing, and so your burdens are stupid. They are beneath you: a cockroach that you kill is more precious than the load others place on your shoulders. And yet there was no disparity between what we said and what we felt. My indifference was not yours to bear and so I did not give it to you. You spoke of your fears and I gave you silence in which to shape your words. When you were done, I took your hand—knowing that I could only understand what my ears could hear. I felt your unrest, your fear; I knew that there was a howling, hungry shadow within you, and my confrontation of it was a sideways thing, a passive thing…ultimately indifferent. Do not mistake this as indifference to you. It is no such thing. Instead, it was (and is) the marrow-deep knowledge that your concerns and my concerns were all that mattered. The world did not exist, and the world’s anxiety was not our own. There was ice on the window. There was warmth in the room, and there were cockroaches. I heard your voice, and so the ice and the windows were meaningless. The roaches were…well…they were hungry. You spoke in your language when mine failed you, and my knowledge of your intimate tongue lives within distinct limits; there are things about you I will never understand. Your brain is an alien space to me. You—for all of your familiarity—are the greatest of mysteries. And perhaps it is in this that Love truly dwells. I can say to you that I love you—I did, after all, suck your thumb. And in uttering those words, remembering the taste of your thumb-skin, I come face-to-face with the knowledge that you are an alien. I will never know all of you. I’m comfortable with that. Knowledge is the willingness to learn and not the comfort of knowing. Now there is ice. Somewhere, there are cockroaches. You and I are not together in this moment, but in this moment, we are not apart. *** Strange things happen when I look at almost-abstract pictures of ice. Winter is a strange season. I understand water, but I don’t truly understand ice. It’s like contemplating the cockles of one’s own heart, and in contemplating cockles, I’ve come to the knowledge that I love my friends. I can name them, which means for some, I can name you.. And though a fictional and nameless narrator has spoken the words above, this image and these words are dedicated to those I love: my friends both near and far, and especially to those going through darkness.