Sleet

[davinheckman]

Sleet.  It always caught him off guard.  He remembered walking miles to school, his toes getting wet, the moisture seeping through his jeans.  His hat would get heavy with the accumulating slush.  No matter what he did, the cold moisture found a way to his skin.  Making matters worse, was the merest adjustment to the atmosphere, and this would all go away.  It would be snow, he could brush it off, play in it.  Snow was fun.  But sleet was penetrating misery. 

Somehow, things had gotten worse when everyone stayed indoors.  At first, the goggles were a fun thing to wear.  A diversion.  A way to play anything, far removed from the conditions outside.  Be a pirate!  A soldier!  A spaceman!  A lobster!  An ocean!  A lobster claw!  Then, the goggles were replaced with direct connections.  And then, the simulations shifted from being literal to psychological.  Scary was no longer a clown with a knife, instead it was your worst terror.  Some people would get transported to a desert battlefield others to the death of a loved one, some would find themselves confined in a suffocating space and others falling from airplane.  Happy went from winning the lottery or kissing a movie star to discovering a parent was still alive or triumphing over a rival.  Storytelling had taken a new turn.  Writers had to create frameworks that could contain singular superlatives of sensation.   

And so, when the weather was bad, it was always the worst.  For him, it always meant the interminable chill of sleet, creeping ever closer to his skin, into his skin, under his skin, into his brain.  It meant the anxiety of not knowing when it would end, of being certain that his socks would be saturated, that it would drip down his neck, that his ears would ache, his clothes become heavy.  Worse, he knew that elsewhere, possibly even only inches away, people were suffering stifling humidity or the dry wind of sub-zero.  What he wouldn't he wouldn't give for a jungle, for a tundra, a desert, even a blizzard.    

[Jeremy Hight]

Somehow, things had gotten worse when everyone stayed indoors.  A diversion.  A way to play anything, far removed from the conditions outside.  Be a pirate!  A soldier!  A spaceman!  A lobster!  An ocean!  A lobster claw!  Life was no longer a clown with a knife, instead it was your worst terror, a suffocating space.  Happy went from winning the lottery or kissing a movie star to discovering a parent was still alive or triumphing over a rival.