There is something in the light this late in winter that causes you to question how alone you have been in the last few months. It has been cold for sometime. We have seen the snow come down and pile up. The children do not jump to the window when the flakes are dropping. Nothing will move them from their catatonic state in front of the television except perhaps for a flower sprout. No, we are stuck in it; the closest thing humans have to prison; the deep, dark night of winter.

But even here, so far away from the warmth that it is difficult to remember the feeling of the sun on your face, buried underneath layers of clothes, waiting for the next pile of snow to prevent my mobility even further, I know each day gets closer to freedom. The house is closed and familiar. The windows have been shut for months. The spider webs of last fall are withered and waving in the wind that hums you to sleep and wakes you. The dawn comes on slowly, but at least it comes unlike a few months past when day would just show up around nine. The dusk races to night. Lives are filled with artificial light: the blue of the computer, the green fluorescent of the kitchen, the yellow of the living room bulb. The waiting for something to happen is painful. We look for reasons to hope and we find them in laughter or in exciting venues, but they are short lived and too much believed in for what they are, and leave us more desperate watching the snow filling up the streets.

Addictions aren’t much different than winter, except for the hope. I have been addicted to sticks for sometime. I have carried them around and used them to escape. They have been with me since childhood. They have extended my reach to think clearer at times, but mostly to heal and comfort and bring solace in a world that makes you feel spit out. They were my connection to the outside during the winter. I sought out space and nature as much as the smoke. But there is no future in sticks. There never was and so I left them where they are and moved on because…because…I am sick of winter and no choices and no escapes and no breath and the thin glimmers of fake hope like the line of dusk breaking in the morning when I am leaving for work.

Winter and Addictions are the same. They squeeze you until it is too comfortable to leave any longer. They make the most abnormal idea, like staying in for forty eight hours, seem perfectly normal. They create a cut out environment that is separate from reality and then offers a retreat that eases the pain of the real world because it provides an immediate escape. The addiction will feed you answers you want to hear. You stay for as long as you can in the house and you take it for today because tomorrow is the enemy of both winter and addiction.

So I stand here in the middle of winter with a missing addiction. Trapped and freed looking for glimpses of hope in the dusk and light. Looking for that sparrow or that light that will say you can open that window and come out. I will know that light because I am dreaming of it. I am dreaming of the time when I do not have to just get through the day. I am dreaming of freedom and spring and forgetting sticks, even if they were oars that saved me.

But you can not build a home out of sticks. They have blurred my vision of this house. It is gray and desolate and needs more than paint. There needs to be movement and change or my addiction will not leave. It will just stay and not be used. It will have to be fought off each day. No, winter gives you enough time to think things through and I need spring and everything that it means.

The snow is falling heavier. The weight of the addiction is heavy. I will not allege myself to the winter, because there is no future in that either. The flakes are heavy and slow in their falling; we will be here all night. I will keep a look out for spring because if I do not I will see only winter and the addiction will return and I will again make peace with the season, that I have done over and over, leading me right back to winter. The prison is only temporary without the addiction; and soon I will swim far away from these shores without the oars of addiction or the anchor of winter into the spring torrent waters brimming with life.