Today it is a week until the solstice. We are almost all out of Black Wheel Year. It is cold outside and the blue reflections of the snow have faded to near black, the curtains still open. We’re close to the Dark Days. It’s been a year of blooming. Black Roses. Of wheels spinning, of moving, keeping things turning. We will have all the way until the 18th January to sink into the gap between years. Last year it was the briefest of Dark Days, gone in a flash. This time we can revel in the quiet and empty. The fertile void. Close the doors, light candles, open new books, breaking their fresh spines, heaping blankets onto the leather couch. And then, a year of knots, tying things together, tethering ourselves in the storm.

I don’t want you to be lonely. That’s important to say up here, near the top. It comes to the surface sometimes, and I think it comes most often in moments of emptiness or uncertainty, but it is a real true emotion, and it makes my heart sad when I hear those words. Why do you feel like that, I ask you, and you tell me whatever is on your mind. How they have a newspaper up in the north and it is real, and how you can’t imagine ever having a functioning newspaper for our community. It’s true. A true feeling. 

The northern lights are up in the sky. We’re on the same street a few days later. You’ve called your mum which you never usually do on the walk home, especially in the cold like this, the phone clutched in your oversized mitten, and we show her where the green light is smoking up above the wooden houses, and she can see this miracle through the pixels of the screen, the data connection, the last five minutes of battery, rinsed by the cold air. What are the chances?

It’s a fragile and exposing thing.

You don’t always remember things in a way that you can place them in time. I try to remind you of the things that happened in the year just gone. All the real things. Retec recording the dawn chorus. Standing with Retec and watching the long sunset across the sands. The video Coco sends us of them singing karaoke in front of their friends who don’t understand a word. Two photos in the mail. Calling Habes after class and talking about Tokyo, a place from your past and Habes’s then future. News of being two-souled. Posting zines to Siasta. Scans zipping back to us, inky letters curving in loop after loop on the page. Siasta comes to the show twice. They introduce their new lover. Sarapa’s giraffe. Sarapa’s laugh. Sarapa loves to play games. Zavea signing in from the airport terminal, halfway across the Atlantic. Or singing. Putting a large block of carved wood into the mail. Iagot sharing demos in the early morning when it seems only the three of us are awake. We listen to Iagot playing bass in her apartment on the other side of the country. Cowboys and starships. Ar sitting in the dressing room of the theatre together with us and repeating how to say ‘we are in the theatre’, ‘in the theatre’. Videos arriving of birds, the wind, the shower water whirling noisily down the drain. Postcards of letters and doodles of our faces, jumpers patterned with our own letters.

It is strange to have this thing inside you and to not know how it can be in the world, and to try to discover that anyway.

We walk in the woods, to the lake and back, which is near frozen but not quite. We don’t stop for long because of the temperature, we don’t want our sweat to chill. We talk all the way there and all the way back. We talk about words and forests. We talk about time. How we could be living in a different time. A parallel time to this time. We think forwards to the far future. You say to me, imagine that we are in a time when we don’t even remember the word for ‘tree’. There are no trees anymore. No trees, not even the memory of the word tree. But we try to grow a forest anyway. Sow seeds. Begin. It’s like that, you say. Beginning in the dark, with a dim sense of what to do, reaching towards something that we have no memory of any longer.

We’re playing the long game. Years and years.

(dogai bor / chris gylee, dec, 2025)