Imagine the place where you live is inundated by snow and ice. It doesn’t matter if there wouldn’t be snow there, of if you’ve never even seen snow before. Just imagine cold, white, grey everywhere. Imagine the light is soft, but everything else is heavy. All you can see and feel is a suffocating cold, and a white bleakness stretching across your world. You can go outside, but it’s with difficulty and there’s nothing to see, anyway. Imagine that everyone is completely preoccupied by surviving in their own colourless, freezing existences and they don’t really talk to you. When they do it’s about snow and ice with intense focus and dullness. You want there to be life beyond the snow. You remember when there was. You don’t think the snow should be everything. You want to talk about leaves or whirling dervishes, or a particular passage from a book you read in adolescence. You want to discuss the history of pop music from the 80s and 90s, or to run without stopping for 55 minutes, or to complain about the weird noises from next door. You want to be beyond this. But you are covered and stifled by paralysing snow.

 

Then suddenly you meet another person. In my example I’m using the male pronoun, but you can substitute whatever best fits your situation. This person isn’t white or grey. He isn’t obsessed with the snow. He doesn’t care about the cold. He breaks through all of that. He lives on the other side of the city, and you have to dig a tunnel through the snow from your bedroom window to his bedroom window. This tunnel goes from your heart to his heart. This is what love is, to me: a protected passage way through the smothering snow and the density of other people, to someone else who is just like you; who sees the world as you do, who feels as you do, and who loves as you do.

 

You change all the lead 
Sleeping in my head to gold
And as the day grows dim
I hear you sing a golden hymn