So:

It's starting to turn towards spring now here. It's not so cold in the mornings, and tonight I caught the last bus home and it wasn't totally dark while I was waiting. The dark gets to me in the winter much more than the cold. I don't think it used to be that way.

I remember those days in Chicago when it would be dark by about 4pm, but I also remember the big chunks of ice on the Lake shore, walking down after study break about 10:00 and seeing the way the light bounced off the ice. Winter never seemed that bad then, and I loved the night.

It's much darker here. The sky is black at night, and walking just a little way away can bring you a night sky filled with stars. But I kind of miss the orange sky in Chicago. Dark there was relative, not absolute.

It's been a rough couple of years. Sometimes I just want to forget everything, to start running and not stop until the past is hazy and gone and I don't have to talk to anyone who remembers the way I was. But I remember how happy I was, sitting on Dylan's car in the thick Atlanta night when the power went out, saying goodbye to the city that was home. The walk down 55th street leaning hard against the freezing wind to make it to the Point to feel the wind whipping around you, at least until the cops came and made you move along. The Christmas lights across Oxford Street in London, running on the beach at St. Simons as the sun went down, sitting on a balcony drinking sangria as the crickets chirped in June in Chicago, when I should have been studying, Fell's Point Halloween night, dressed as 1.5 blind mice, a summer night after the rain in Ireland. I wouldn't give up those memories.

Here's hoping I start feeling better with the longer days.