AMNESIA

All of a sudden, the air feels warmer than the day before, and what yesterday were insurmountable piles of snow, are now withering tongues of grey water, running down the street, falling down a city drain, moribund liquid fingers back into the river where they came from. The sun is hanging up there, and the lake resurfaces, cerulean, among diminishing diamonds. The bikes take over the boulevards, and there is a rush of mountebank squirrels walking the electric lines upside down. And somehow we forget. We forget that it was yesterday when the arctic winds were puncturing our purple lungs. Yesterday when there were five, six, maybe seven layers of clothes trapping our frail sweaty body. When no social life was allowed, and the only trip out of the dry, ultraheated, unsanitarily hot apartment was the one to the grocery store across the street. Intoxicated by the smell of this warm humid air, by the sweet colors of the red bricks and greystones under the light of a phony spring, and the wet sounds of tires rolling on the melting ice, we forget, and love again this place. In two or three days, we will barely be able to remember what was the big deal about the icestorm that collapsed the city. And then, it'll start snowing.