That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you. — Ali Smith, Winter
Last week I got home from a brisk night outing and, taking off my jewelry, I realized I was missing a ring. When I lose something, it’s an event. I interrogate all possible witnesses, no matter how trivial the item. In the midst of a feud with a budget rental car company in Fukuoka, I urged the receptionist at my school to inquire at the end of one of many heated phone calls if the staff had perhaps located the carrying sleeve for my portable battery. That I hadn’t noticed a missing ring for what could have been hours, compounded a feeling that had been growing as the years had gotten later and the days had gotten shorter: Are those my hands?
Every year my personal first day of winter is the day I go from looking roughly five years younger than my actual age to about ten years older. I look in the mirror and see Yubaba incarnate; the backs of my hands become dusty alligator skin grafted over dense frozen fish fingers. This year as winter crept in I noticed too that my fingers and toes were losing a bit of spring in their step. So far from my heart, some days I can’t feel them.
I went hiking on my own for three days over New Years in Tanzawa, a few hours southwest of Tokyo. When I set out from my apartment on December 30, I turned off my phone and felt the pleasant stretch of unmarked time before me. (Some thirty to fifty minutes later—who’s to tell–I quickly turned my phone back on at the turnstile, realizing I needed it to swipe out of the train station.)
On the mountains, in the -5C weather, I congratulated myself that after a relatively sedentary four months, my body still knew how to keep itself warm. I rarely feel naturally warm in my apartment, which has, like many homes in Japan, poor insulation. At Christmas dinner a few days before, a woman from school had cheerfully informed us that she had gotten frost bite in her own apartment and had had to go to the hospital. (The average December low in Tokyo, for those wondering, is 39F/4C. It’s 31F/0C in New York.)
There alone at the top of Tonōdake, at the bottom of 2021, I was making my own heat! I was free! Free of my phone, free of an existential dread that’d been following me around for the last few years, free of the pressure of anything but the sun’s trajectory across the sky. All I had to do was keep burning through peanuts and raisins, calorie-packed instant ramen, putting one foot in front of the other, and I could keep going, seemingly forever. I was a warrior of the mountain! No fear! OK, some fear. I became aware of the alien nubs of my fingers, swollen but also stiff, sweating and freezing. I was afraid of losing my fingers. I was afraid of having to dictate all my future writing. I was afraid of doing damage to my body in a way that would not bounce back because I was not twenty-two, when things just bo-ing. I was afraid of having to explain to a doctor in Japanese on New Year’s eve that I had been too distracted by the prospect of freedom to have invested in proper gloves and that was why I could no longer feel my hands. OK, two fears. Frostbite and looking stupid.
As far as feelings go, the one of not feeling is puzzling. Frostbite, being a condition of being frozen, is not something you feel. According to the many internet searches I did at home days later, you might not realize you have it until someone points it out. In October, I compressed a nerve in yoga class and my outer left thigh went numb. The feeling still hasn’t come back. I'm reassured by both doctor and yoga friends that there’s no cause for alarm. “Does it really matter if your outer thigh has feeling or not?” said one such friend, somewhat fatalistically I thought, cocking her head to one side. “I’m surprised you even noticed.” She’s right; I have to periodically pinch myself to check how, and if, I feel.
During one particularly cold winter in New York, I was standing on a subway platform looking up. I was staring at a huge icicle that had formed from the ceiling over the tracks, a monstrous gleaming rod at least two feet long that ended in a cartoony point. My coworker leaned over my shoulder. “How much would I have to pay you to lick that?” Hm, I calculated, thinking of my hypothetical earnings. How bad could it be? The bacteria would be killed by being frozen, I intuited, quite incorrectly. Recalling this to a biologist friend later, she gave me a look, almost of pity: “You’re thinking of boiling. Freezing preserves life.”
When the cold sets in in November, I reassure myself that the days will get longer again (they are!), that the thrill of spring will come again (it will!), and so too will the scream of summer, that my hair and skin will revive to shimmering heights and come pliantly back to life again, and so on. It’s all we can do to hope that at the end of the yearly stillness, the freeze will have preserved us without too much damage. Like last year’s apples, protect us just so, and we’ll last through the season. You’ll take a huge juicy bite, hardly know the difference.
But another voice whispers across the backs of my scaly knuckles as my hand cramps around my pen. What if you don’t make it out of this one, what if it’s permanent, what if you don’t even know something’s wrong until someone points it out, and then it’s too late to fix and your fingers have all been amputated. Poised carefully, I write the kanji for water. One flick from an imprecise hand, and water becomes ice. One more, and it becomes forever.