Winter’s all-nighter a terrifying 2:30 a.m. joyride to the airport in lazy champagne bubbles of fizzing snow, your dashboard reading twenty-three below.
I-29 punctuated with stalled-out cars and trucks — blinking hazards a festive spritz of twinkly lights, glowing emergency roadside triangles, the light-show rave and swoop of ambulance beams gyrating on a backdrop of white, snow-banked shoulders.
So many metal beasts with stopped hearts, waiting for defibrillation.
Your turn-signal blinkers too frozen to blink. Your engine softly coughs.
Your toes turn to a painful glitter of icy sparkling nubs.
Your breath circling from your mouth in such a hyperbole of cascading swirls and plumes that you swear you’re exhaling out your own ghost.
(Out with the old / in with the new)
And you’re almost glad of it — this exhalation, this scourge — even though you fear it will leave behind only a frozen carapace that, when thawed, will shatter like glass under hot water.
What you welcome, though, is the aperture: a dazzling, scoured space to welcome light.
3:30 a.m. airport’s fluorescent glaze, ribbony rat maze to the TSA checkpoint, back-scatter x-ray scan, and security pat-down seems surreal after being spit out of the frozen, cavernous black.
When you land in MSP there’s a hubbub in the terminal: a dalmatian puppy! Everyone wants to stop and smile and pet this warm and polka-dotted and newly-wagging life.
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