But did I really? I felt all… (senses) heightened. Which the weather has always done to us, but it’s much worse during the weirdest winter weather we’ve ever weathered.

I walked the dog, and there was a sun-steaked thaw all around me. Because it occurred after a couple consecutive days of “extreme” cold, I couldn’t help but interpret the conditions as “spring-like”. It doesn’t matter that our last spell of winter was only a few days long, I felt the brightness as profoundly as though I’d been suffering since October. And the incongruity of that was troubling in its own, predictable way.

Similar to the confusion at entering my room which had grown subtly brighter while I was downstairs. Like fluorescent icing smeared over my incandescent cake of a lair, some kind soul (Edgar) had armed my ceiling with a second, corkscrewed bulb (the kind I’d been boycotting for years) in the meantime. But hey, more light! How lovely, and how jarring to the hunched and sleepy, stumbling groundhog I’d become.

“What is it about today?” Andrew kept saying. He took his turn napping with the dog on the bed while I tried to dispose of a bunch of dust and garbage and expired make-up. I cracked open a forgotten box of CDs from this summer’s move, reunited many long-separated albums with their liner notes, took a fond inventory of cases that had fallen apart due to wear (No More Shall We Part and This is Hardcore literally crumbled in my hands), and found that Firefly DVD and Juno soundtrack of yours I swore I didn’t have…

Is it something about today? Or is it just the light? The light and the elimination of dust? And the fact that I found my Disintegration disc hidden behind that shelf? We listened to the album in its entirety (half of us only half-awake).

“Do you know what this album is about? It was written in the year leading up to Robert Smith’s thirtieth birthday.”

Blue Monday?!

Yes. I had to throw this out, and I had to document it beforehand, and I had to dwell on it long after. Through the roof of your mouth, through the mouth of your eye, through the eye of the needle.

And I started it from the beginning again, and even watched some videos. I went on the Internet and it seems somebody came up with a name and a reason for our feelings. I felt validated, and a little ripped-off and then it didn’t really matter anymore when this Monday I felt about the same, except a bit worse. Even the winters that aren’t winters are such winters. Please be over.

And just be thirty already, the fine line is killing me.