Rachel Paz Ruggera (she/her) is a research technician in a developmental biology lab and holds a BS in Biology from Boston College. Her work is published or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, The Writing Disorder, LEVITATE, and Idle Ink.

What Makes the Cold Bearable

We live in a morbid generation. Where teenagers say “I’m dead” to mean that was so funny. Where college students say “I want to kill myself” to mean that was inconvenient. Where college students actually want to kill themselves.  

Sixty-three million people died in the year 2020. That’s six million more than the usual lot. Anonymous bodies piled up in mass graves on Hart Island a few miles from where people worked on video calls from their apartments in Manhattan. Families waited months to schedule their loved ones’ funerals, while I took organic chemistry lab online in my bedroom.

We live in a morbid generation. My sister is addicted to true crime podcasts. My high school graduating class danced and sang our hearts out to “Die Young” by Kesha at our winter formal. The most sought-after class at my university is a 300-person lecture, completely filled each semester, on the psychology of serial killers. Is this some sort of sign that we’re all half in love with easeful death, or has it always been this way?

We are so keenly aware of our own mortality, I think now more than ever. Gone is the invincibility of youth when an invisible virus can take your breath away in an instant.

The dean emailed us at 5:30 on a Wednesday evening. I remember because I had orchestra rehearsal at 6:00 and my first thought was are we still going to have practice?

Once, I could recall this time so clearly, those last few days on campus. It’s getting fuzzy now. I don’t want to remember. I want to remember students filing into classrooms, sitting at orderly rows of desks, the halls echoing with voices as we rushed out the doors then grew hushed once again. Not the chaos that came afterward.

I was checking my email on my phone as I walked out of Stokes South. Or was it that I was walking outside when my phone started buzzing incessantly in my pocket, my roommates flooding the group chat with messages to check your email right now? Either way, there it was: the message equally dreaded and inevitable. “Pack your bags. You’re going home”.

At least it was an answer to our anxieties and suspicions. An end to the whispered rumors in the dining halls and dorm rooms, now a muffled panic—the high-pitched buzzing of a beehive that senses danger. That whole week we were walking through campus as if on borrowed time. What else were we supposed to do besides keep going to class? Keep studying for that exam next week when we didn’t know if we’d be here tomorrow?

It's amazing what people will do when they know their time is up. Actions no longer have meaning. No longer have consequence. Or they’re imbued with too much meaning, our last night on campus, the last time we get to spend with these friends, the last breath of air before we’re all pulled under.

Later that night, I heard stories of students losing their minds. The freshmen on Newton Campus running through their dorm halls punching holes in the ceiling. Students throwing rocks at the stained-glass windows of their beloved Gasson Hall. Two friends crying and embracing in the middle of the sidewalk. One boy bringing duffel bags to the dining hall and filling them with everything nonperishable he could carry before running back to his room and shutting the door. The next morning, I walked across campus and found benches overturned, lamp posts knocked down, and trash strewn across the quad. Did nothing matter anymore because we were all going home? Was the past semester and a half one big experiment to see how I fared with a new city, new people, new life?

The experiment was over. We had all failed. And in our desperate attempt to regain some shred of control over the situation, to express our indignation at the injustice of it all, we destroyed our home before anyone else could destroy it for us.

Sitting in my car in the parking lot, my windows were rolled down so I could talk to my friend parked beside me. Katie’s windows were also down, letting in the breeze. This was the only time I saw her in person during the pandemic, sitting in the parking lot of a Target with not only six feet between us, but also buckled into our separate cars as if we could drive away at the first sign of a cough or the slightest sniffle.

We talked about school, what it was like and what we thought it would be. We talked about ourselves, how much we’ve changed and how much we wanted to change still.

It reminded me of another time we were in the car together years ago. Katie’s mom was driving us home from Disneyland after spending the entire day tromping all over the park in the sun. “The most exhausting place on Earth,” our cynical fifteen-year-old-selves liked to call it. When the park finally closed and we started the long trek through the never-ending parking lots and garages, we were dragging our feet and stumbling along in a moody cloud of exhaustion.

I don’t know who started it, but somewhere along the way we started singing along to the cheesy, theme-park background music playing from those hidden speakers behind the bushes and at the tops of streetlamps curving overhead. The music trickled in from all angles, even blasting out of those fake plastic rocks strategically placed along the path to ensure a continuous onslaught of that orchestral Disney magic.

How we sang along to that lyric-less elevator music, I will never know. It wasn’t so much that we were singing words, but rather singing rhythms and syncopations, most importantly making as much noise as possible. With every hundred feet the song would change as we passed into a new area of the park and so would our wordless song. Soon enough we were dancing, too, or rather skipping, shuffling, and spinning our way across the sidewalk, not sparing a single thought for the strangers walking ahead and behind also on their final pilgrimages to their cars.

In the haze of exhaustion and hysteria of our newfound pastime, I must’ve said something stupid like—I can’t feel my feet!— and we both broke down into uncontrollable laughter. In that moment, I was not myself, but instead a pair of worn shoes dancing across concrete. My world narrowed to the sound of her laugh and my own body shaking, doubled over, and breathless.

There was no past—all previous slights and wrongdoings were forgotten, better yet, they never even happened. There was no future, of this I was certain—but it didn’t scare me.

There was only sound, movement, the ground beneath me that may fall away with my next step, the sidewalk opening up like two gaping jaws—not menacing, but laughing—to swallow me whole, never to be seen again. And there we were marching along with our arms linked at the elbows, singing so loudly it drowned out the grumbling of the earth. My feet weren’t numb with overexertion, they just felt the rumbling echoes of the earth, laughing at us as if to say—enjoy it while it lasts.

But we’ve always known this—life changes in an instant, as quickly and as easily as stepping on a crack in the sidewalk.

Somehow, we made it back to the car in one piece. We strapped ourselves into the back seat as her mother drove through the parking lot, mostly empty at this hour, and onto the darkened streets outside the park. The dark pressed into the car as a quiet finally settled over us. I caught my breath and remembered just how tired I was.

Every once in a while, the dark would be broken as we passed under a streetlamp or drove through a stoplight, the light spilling in and illuminating our faces for an instant. Maybe it was during a lull in the conversation or right before we both drifted off to sleep, the low hum of the engine persistent in our ears, but Katie’s eyes met mine from across the car and wordlessly held my gaze. In a moment, we drove past the streetlight and were plunged into darkness once again.

I love Boston in the winter. I can go for a short walk outside and freeze my ass off. I can see my breath in the air. My hands get red and numb even when shoved into my coat pockets. I forget how cold the world can get, living in southern California my whole life where it doesn’t go below fifty even on the darkest winter nights. Living here reminds me what people mean when they say winter. Reminds me of the possibilities in this world.

Then after my frigid morning stroll, I can walk back into my building where—miracle of miracles—it will be warm again. I love this just as much as I love the cold, this relief, this joy that comes from returning home again. Or if not home, then at least someplace warm, dry, and comforting. The feeling of kicking the snow from my boots, peeling off my wet socks, making coffee and sitting by the window to watch the snow fall. Thinking to myself, I was just out there freezing my ass off, but now I’m here, safe and sound, and isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t this life wonderful?

Sometimes I think it’s trivial, to be this happy from feeling the warmth return to my hands. Then I take a sip of my coffee and remember.

Katie texted me a few weeks before Christmas to tell me she had cancer. Lymphoma. It flared up over Thanksgiving break and now she’s flying home to get treatment. I texted back that I loved her, I was thinking of her, and that I couldn’t wait to see her again. I went back to my dorm and cried in bed for two hours.

A month or so later, she texted me again. After a week in the hospital and endless blood tests and biopsies, the doctors think it isn’t cancer at all. It’s some rare disease that presents exactly the same as cancer, but should resolve itself naturally in time. Another miracle, if I can borrow the word.

But this time, it takes a little longer for feeling to return to my hands. For me to brush off death like the snow on my shoulders before it can melt and seep into my clothes, chilling me to the bone. The joy from her good news is somehow still tinged with sadness.

How are we supposed to go on living knowing that at any moment life may take a turn for the worse? Knowing how cold it can get? Knowing the possibilities?

I asked the birds once, what makes being outside in the cold bearable? They answered: The certainty that you would have somewhere warm and comforting to go. The certainty that you would come in from the cold.

Sometimes I dream of falling asleep in the snow. Silent as an early winter morning. Angels with a wingspan as far as my fingers can reach. Peace washes over me at last. No one would find me here. No one would look. Was I even here at all?

I like to sit in the woods and see just how cold it can get. For the first hour, I’m still warm from the trek out there, still distracted by the book I brought or by writing in my notebook. In the second hour, maybe the breeze starts to pick up, maybe I have to warm my hands for a bit by blowing on them furiously, before I can pick up my pen again. In the third, the sun is dipping behind the tree line and I can’t feel my nose or cheeks.

As I sit here, hiding from real life in the woods, I finally begin to blend into the trees. Squirrels walk right up to me and go about their business, climbing up trunks and chasing each other across branches. The robins get so close I can see the thin twigs they land on bend under their slight weight, then spring up again when they take flight. They convince me to stay a little longer and sit with them before I finally turn to walk home.

I want to take the name of a bird. To wander for my entire life and miss no one when I’m gone. To hurt no one by leaving. I want to land on a branch and have it not even bend an inch under my weight. The only sign I’ve been here: the slight swaying of leaves when there’s no breeze.

The day we got the email, the only thing that kept me from breaking down was orchestra rehearsal. I showed up late, standing in the lobby downstairs, pacing back and forth, unsure of whether or not I should go in. I didn’t see anyone on the fourth floor. No one unpacking their instruments in the hallway, rushing in with their sheet music under their arms. But when I walked into the practice room, there were still people setting up chairs in that same old half-circle facing the front of the room.

I remember taking out my cello and trying desperately not to cry. I tightened my bow. Ran the rosin back and forth across the horsehair. Took my seat and finally noticed how empty the room was.

We were playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, fourth movement.

Our clarinetist was out of breath and red in the face. The conductor kept running back and forth between the front of the room and the piano to pick out the flute part. There was no choir, but we could all hear in our minds the insistent cry of Freude! Joy! in the tenors and basses.

I don’t speak a word of German, but I would know that five-note melody anywhere. The “Ode to Joy.”

It sounded terrible. I’ll never forget it. You could feel the calm wash over the room, even as the music was chaotic and messy. We had to start and stop several times, but we got through it. I looked up from the music and saw Katie across from me, eyes red and puffy, but she still smiled. I looked around the room and everyone was crying. Even our conductor.   

I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t let myself cry. I held back tears until the end of rehearsal, until we had all packed up our instruments and gone our separate ways. I’m holding back still.

I began writing this as a lament, a requiem, an elegy for my lonely, fearful generation. But I’ll end it instead as an ode to joy. Why is it that every time I write about sadness, joy seems to reappear? Do humans have this undying, irrational optimism? Or is this the truth of it? Can it really be? That out of all this fear, grief, silence, suffering—joy? Does pain always remain, but just painted over? Waiting for the next heavy rain to chip it away and show through? Does it take a vacation, a sabbatical, returning with new methods to haunt me? Or does it want to go somewhere else? To leave me be? To move on? Does pain pity me? Does pain wish it could float away? Where does it all go—the pain? Must it go somewhere at all? Or does it transform? The warmth returning to my hands. The rumbling of the earth beneath my feet. What makes the cold bearable.