make one of those really stupid-looking tiny snowmen for me pls

by Lily Nobel, all time sleeper fatty

Illustration by Alice Rosenberg & Zoe Brunk, Contributor(s)

This year, my summer will be nine months long. I’m writing from Windhoek, Namibia, where every day it gets up to 80 (I’m still thinking in Fahrenheit) and my most consistent company are a sheath of mosquito bites on both of my legs from the knees down. I’ve eaten a lot of good meat and seen a couple leopards. I’ve drank a lot of Savanna-brand hard cider and shown a hysterically enthusiastic crowd of middle schoolers “America time” with the special second time setting on my watch (it was 4:38 p.m. here, 7:38 a.m. in Colorado). Something I have not seen is a snowstorm, though I keep getting emails from ResLife about pipes exploding because of ice. 

The main thing I remember about Oberlin winter is the pain. Oberlin winter gets so cold it hurts. You’re walking and you have to stop and cover up your face with your gloves because the snow is falling sideways and burning your forehead, cheeks, and nose. You forget your gloves, realize you’ve forgotten them when you’ve already left your building, and face the choice of being late to class if you run all the way back up the stairs to get the gloves, choose to go without the gloves, get that feeling where your hands start sweating bitterly, tingling, unable to uncurl your fingers. 

Also, it’s dark all the time, it’s hard to get out of bed, all of the gross places on campus (shoutout Wilder) seem grosser because they’re wet, dark, and cold. 

Almost every time I’ve seriously said to myself, I wish I didn’t go to this school, it was mid-winter. Being casual, Oberlin winter is a trial. If I’m serious, I sometimes think Oberlin winter is a punishment for being too comfortable in the fall. 

Now this is the winter of my endless summer. My familiar images come back to me like a deck of playing cards and beseech me to shuffle through them because I’m so far away from home. The things I know have become more difficult to distinguish from the things I love. 

Here are other things I remember about Oberlin winter: 

Slush and road salt caking and coating the first few square feet in front of the door of every building I’ve lived in; getting my socks wet stepping in all of it over and over. 

One day late January when my girlfriend and my former roommate and this person we used to be friends with walked to IGA in sub-zero weather to get, I don’t know, bread and yogurt or something, and even though I wasn’t in the state I could picture with complete clarity that kind of cold.

Convincing myself to go into my job, imagining playing sick (In the library employee portal: “Migraine coming on :((( if anyone cld pick this up for me would REALLY appreciate !!”), going anyway, this insane gratitude for the universe I feel when I walk out of Mudd at 10:00 p.m. and it’s lightly snowing.

That perfect thin early morning frost across Tappan that romantic poets write about in more pastoral contexts.

This one image from this one night, a night that broke through the vague grind of coldness with a feeling of extraordinary clarity, a sense of beginning – my girlfriend in the parking lot behind Baldwin in her green canvas winter coat overtop a black sweatshirt, hat with blue and gray stripes, glasses, nose red from the cold, looking at everything through the fantasia of the snow into the future. 

Those ridiculous fucking snowmen people make on the benches sometimes, with two twig arms and a face made of four or five rocks. 

Oberlin winter reminds you that you are a warm-blooded animal. Being a warm-blooded animal adds an additional layer of friction to everything—to eat, you must suffer the cold. To go to class, you must suffer the cold. To see friends, you must suffer the cold. You put your body in transit and do the best you can to protect it, but if every Oberlin student has one thing in common, it’s that we do a lot of fucking walking around to one dumb place or another. You interface with the cold, you interface with your body, you feel more acutely the passage of time. You are burdened by the night, also the dampness. When I’m in Oberlin in the winter, I get so sick of taking my coat on and off all the time. 

In Windhoek, there is very little friction between my body and my environment. The most that happens is it rains while my clothes are drying on the line; then I have to wait a few more hours for them to dry and when I take them in they smell like rain and that’s a good thing. I’m barefoot in class half the time. The mosquitos are their own type of friction—but ultimately they do not hurt me in my bones like the wet cold.

And because of that, I’ve come to the conclusion that that miserable, cold Oberlin winter is worth being in. I think sometimes we need to be forced to reckon with our inalterable somatic vulnerability. I think the cold alerts us to the fact that we are alive. It asks us to advocate for our bodies. You walk outside in Oberlin cold and wake up. I think I remember that night with my girlfriend so well because of the cold. And you always get the bliss of returning home and warming up. The cold makes you pay attention. 

It’s a little sad, right? I’m on the other side of the world and I’m supposed to be doing exciting things with cool people, but instead I’m sitting in the dark on my computer waxing poetic about something I hate when I’m actually in it. All I’m saying, I guess, is that it’s easy to lose the gravity of moving through space. You take your body for granted. You become adversarial with things that make you aware of it. All I’m saying is I hope you try to enjoy Oberlin winter for me, and I will try to enjoy endless summer for you.