Winter Night Anxiety
Snow was falling. Through the narrow slit of curtains shut tight since midday, I hadn’t even realized that the world outside had already sunk into darkness. Inside my room, I quietly stroked my solitude, when it suddenly struck me. Of all days, today is trash day.
After midnight, stepping outside the front door sometimes requires more courage than one might expect. I stood still, the key cold in my hand.
The keychain dangling from the cold metal, they said, was made in a small village somewhere in Central Asia, a place defined only by the lines drawn across a continent. As she scanned the barcode and swiped the card, the clerk had said:
“My job is to help small people sell things at fair prices to the big ones.”
Compared to that, my job is pitiful.
A life that amounts to nothing more than tossing a trash bag into a bin on a Tuesday night. A life that, before that, was spent producing the very trash now sealed in plastic.
And yet, even for something that trivial, I hesitate.
Because of the vague fear lurking just beyond the door, I sometimes imagine the key snapping in the lock as I turn it.
Thankfully, tonight’s fear didn’t break the key.
The air outside was so cold that with each breath I couldn’t tell whether my throat was freezing or burning. I glanced down to check on the toes peeking red from between my slippers, and there it was: snow, dusting the ground.
Finally, I lifted my gaze.
Snowflakes fell with the weight of gravity itself, crashing onto sharp-edged Western rooftops. They scattered beneath the streetlights, falling carelessly, indifferently.
My footsteps pressed faint traces into the whitened road.
Then came the thought, sudden and heavy:
That even these fleeting, insignificant marks might mean more in my life than I’d ever imagined.
That night, in a darkness different from the one outside the window, tucked beneath thick blankets, with loneliness once again beneath my head, I asked myself — until sleep came — just how worn out the pace and shape of my life had become.
