remnants of me

December has rolled in like a lion, just over three days of continuous snowfall with an accumulation of over 41 inches of snow. I feel like I'm reliving the film, Ground Hog's Day. It wouldn't be so bad if the city plows didn't move the detritus of people's once parked cars at the end of my freshly shoveled driveway. The snow pack is wet and thick, heavy from friction, like concrete. My body aches in specific areas from shoveling and negotiating the uncleared walkways of the neighborhood with my dog pulling at me to move faster. I slip and slide with every footfall and cannot seem to find any rhythm to my gait in this incredibly annoying inconvenience. I used to love the snow. The cold air that feels like it's burning my lungs. Snowflakes melting on my face, those that bless my eyelids with their touch and the ones I unintentionally inhale while walking. It's a serene landscape in an otherwise irksome college neighborhood, with freshman and other class men/women imposing themselves on my tired disturbed mind. Their obnoxious self-involved actions direct my mind to spaces unreached, places I don't want to dwell, angry and violent thoughts exist there, straight-jacketed so as not to harm anyone. As a youth, my walls used to bare the brunt of that part of me, now controlled, but seething just beneath the surface on the verge of erupting into a frenzied attack against my sanity. Syracuse has found a way to resurrect those remnants of me, which I thought I had laid to rest a long time ago.