I have stopped thinking about winter. I have stopped thinking about anything at all. It’s a new methodology I’m trying out. It involves pacifying wants with better hydration and sipping green tea like a whiskey sour. I couldn’t tell you if it works, it’s Day One. It’s always Day One. The only thing I ever truly understood is this: that everybody is guessing their way through life. Homeless preachers, mothball billionaires and the child bride on stilts; all as baffled as the next. What is the use in regarding winter, when it will pass like some face in a crowd?

So I’ve stopped thinking of you, too. I have stopped thinking of you and instead, I listen to hours of positive affirmations play through headphones. I’m told I radiate joy and positive energy, but the voices don’t register the ground up cannabis in my nails. There’s no census of friends, only the binaural beat of false creation but still, I am told repeatedly of my brilliance. It’s enough to go to anybody’s head. That, coupled with old fortune cookie prophecy, leads me to believe in a signpost reality.

I have stopped lending misery to others. Look at my face now and you’ll see absence. It’s an old trick of Buddhism and the new one of fashion. I’ll not smile painfully your way, nor will you catch a scowl in the small reflection of the window. Impassive through and through, I assure you there is a beat somewhere in this chest. It’s still going. I know that because the drinks are still flowing for everybody else but me. I serve you and your friends. You thank me, tip me, pour me over your ice and then forget me by the next song.

I have stopped caring greatly about friendship. Coffee shop dreams and foreign coastlines are imagined only in solitude. Faithful book and the illusion of depth. All inept artists do the same. When nothing else is blooming to art, just turn yourself into it. So, I have stopped thinking about winter. I have stopped thinking about you, and them, and the times I took off my shirt. It’s Day One, but already I am liking what I see. I will wear this indifference like the patterned scarves I’m soon to leave at home.