THE BEST WINTER I HAD WAS THE SUMMER I SPENT IN SAN FRANCISCO

And then winter comes.

Summer has been longer than expected. Wasted time, some work done, some good, some bad. Fall has been busy, storing food for winter. Then winter comes. We have been busy collecting cans, boxes, all the food we thought could last for a long time. We were so busy collecting it we never bothered checking if the shelves were all right, if there were aunts walking behind furniture, bugs hiding somewhere. We thought we were organized, we thought “Winter will never catch me unprepared again”. We should have checked out what was less evident, though. We thought we were smart, we have been silly instead. We were so obsessed not to behave like a balm-cricket anymore that we forgot to see if the aunts could be real friends or rather foes, ready to eat all we stored.

There it is: a hole. It is not clear if bugs come into that hole or if food has its legs and walk away on its own. We imagine armies of unfriendly aunts carrying our cans, our boxes away. Who cares if they don’t have a can opener. What matters is that our food is not there anymore. We sit on our empty kitchen, staring at empty shelves. We should have checked, damn us. We don’t have anything left.

The winter is severe outside. Snow starts to fall. Another fool shoots missionaries on a convent door. The fog covers landscapes and everything is blurred. Was it foggy in our brain when we start collecting without any sense of measure or any attention our supplies for the winter? How could we be so blind? So obsessed? The only thing we have now is a leaflet on the table that says “Come to San Francisco: it’s summer here”. Should we take that flight and pretend it is not winter anymore? Should we go and enjoy summertime and leave winter behind our shoulders? If we leave now we can start piling up our stuff all over again: nobody will know we have been so careless before. It will be again summer, followed by fall, and then we’ll have a winter. We’ll preten our full-of-mistakes-winter had never happened.

So we do it. We take our money, we fly to San Francisco but summer does not look like summer. Summer in San Francisco is rainy and cold, humid, foggy. It is winter again, just a little bit less harsh, less severe. But it does not mean that cold still sneaks inside your bones. Instead of being slammed on the face by our winter we have chosen to slowly get frozen by a summer-non-summer.

So, there we are, sitting under a palm with a coat on. “Well, well, it is always better than the winter at home. It is always summer” we think. During my university psychology class I was taught this is called wishful thinking: a state of mind in which you realize you have no choice, you did wrong and cannot escape and, nevertheless, want it to appear the best condition ever. A sophisticated kind of lie. But we are too smart to believe it. Winter has come and we thought we were prepared but we haven’t been careful enough. We knew it was inevitable. We’ll never stop try to be ready and we’ll never be. Not to be disappointed totally we chase after summer again: but who can fool time? Time always goes by in one direction. Maybe next summer will be better than the previous one but you need to pass through winter before and if you were not ready to face winter, well.. that’s really just your problem. Winter has come: you can try to escape it, but you’ll carry it with you wherever you go. The best you can say is that the best winter you had was the summer you spent in San Francisco. A sophisticated, lenitive lie.