Winter at Home

Winter at Home

Cordova was especially barren this time of year. From late spring to late summer, fisherfolk filled the harbor, looking to pick the Prince William Sound of salmon. People rattled anxiously around town, buying the last part to fix their engine, sweeping the grocery store for the last loaf of bread, and feverishly mending nets before the next opener started. But when cranes fly south and the wind begins to bite back, town empties out again.

The winter of 2022 had been colder and bleaker than usual, not that Alaska winters were ever kind. Houses, sided by windswept snowbanks, stared vacantly from frost-tinted windows. Everything was monochromatic—gray sky, off-white snow, and sagging black evergreens—like a cheerless charcoal sketch of winter. Days passed slowly. Long, dark nights were blank calendar boxes in groups of seven that extended into another empty year.

My therapy session—a twice-a-week affair I’d fought hard for—started in 10 minutes. I stood across the street from the clinic, hands shoved deep in my pockets, watching the sky. Clouds gathered in a weighted sheet, swollen with soon-to-be snow. I was always early for everything. The first in, the first out. There was some cosmic urgency in it for me. Being late had felt like the single thread-pull needed to unravel everything. Lately, it was just another habit.

Nine minutes early. Eight minutes early. Seven minutes early.

A white truck pulled into the parking lot, expelling ashy-black exhaust into the cold air. From behind me, a magpie chattered in the alders. A woman with a sleek black lab shuffled past. She lifted her head briefly, smiling for just a moment; I tried to return the gesture, but her eyes slid away. The lab let out a clipped bark and the magpie sounded annoyed as it flew from its branch, knocking a few icicles that shattered on the sidewalk with small tink, tink, tinks.

Four minutes early. Three minutes early. Two minutes early.

I started walking across the snow-packed street, halting directly where the yellow center strips would be. After I’d planned the date for my suicide, it had become harder to go through those smudgy double doors and tell my therapist about a life I hadn’t been living—or one I didn’t plan to live for much longer. Today, I couldn’t make it across the street.

Twenty minutes late.

The clinic was two streets from Eyak Lake—an expansive stretch of glacial runoff from the Copper River. It’d been cold enough to freeze over completely. I walked along the edge of the road, peering down the short rocky drop at ice skate scars and boot track freckles. A pair of dark bundled figures stumbled around on the distant shore—it was too far to hear or see what they were doing, but the way they moved as one made me think they must’ve been happy.

Snow began to fall from full bellied clouds. Everything was white, quiet, and still. Lake Avenue couldn’t take me anywhere. The road went farther than most in town, but I’d eventually hit the end of state maintenance, then the forest would swallow it completely.

Thirty minutes late.

My feet started to tingle from wearing sneakers instead of boots as I passed Skaters Cabin: a little Forest Service building with pale cedar sides and a bright green top that almost glowed in the winter dim. It overlooked a cropped gravel beach with a firepit, a dented culvert big enough to walk through upright, and one towering hemlock with a broken tire swing.

When I was younger, we’d come down here in the summers to swim. Even on the hottest days, the lake barely reached 45° but there was something fun about goose-bumped skin and chattering teeth in mid-July. We’d bring squirt guns and my siblings and I would battle it out until someone eventually took it too far and Mom called a ceasefire. Our hands got sticky from apple slices and messily packed salmon sandwiches made with the good bread that fishing money bought.

Thinking about it made my heart fall loose, thumping quietly somewhere else. A lump formed in its place. The last memory I’d have of this beach would be crystallized with the weight inside me.

Forty minutes late.

Snow collected on my hair, freezing in clumps that melted when I breathed on it. I pulled my hood up tight around my face. Past state maintenance, the road snaked and receded until it was barely big enough to squeeze two cars side-by-side. One shoulder curved against the lake shore, rugged black boulders clustered around the trunks of pines and hemlocks that towered high. The other hugged the mountain’s base.

Light shifted from gray to pale blue that softened every edge. The air smelled of damp bark and woodstove smoke from someone’s cozy lakeside cabin. My joints felt weak, stiffened in the cold I hadn’t prepared for. Walking turned to disjointed wandering, zig-zagging from one side of the road to the other—resting one leg while the other burned. My phone went off against my thigh; I’d tucked it into the shallow front pocket of my jeans, hidden underneath the bulk of my knee length coat. I knew it was Mom calling—there wouldn’t be anyone else.

One hour late.

Walking became too painful, I shuffled to the edge of the road where lumpy snowbanks rose over my waist. I curled on my side, ice chunks poked and stung through my coat. Everything was a deep blue now; objects had lost shadow and dimension, lying flat into a backdrop. Maybe if I could close my eyes and rest for a while, I’d wake up somewhere else, far away.

My phone rang in intervals, and I finally looked at the cold screen, its black-ice sheen reflecting a hollow face. Five missed calls from Mom, one from the clinic. The seventh call lit the screen.

Most of me was already dead—floating in that place where Mom was just 3 letters on a contact. But the small, alive part wanted to hear her answer with worry. I could tell her I needed to be saved—cut out from the corpse and made alive again.

Instead, she answered confused. “Malia? Where in the world are you? Jesse called—you didn’t show up to your appointment?”

“I’m—” my frozen fingers clamped down on the phone’s sides. “I went for a walk.”

Her sigh crackled across the poor connection, “You went for a walk?”

“…Yeah. By the lake.” I tilted my head up, looking into the black-blue. Snow fell even thicker, toppling over me like hazy stars.

“You can’t just flake like that; you were the one who asked for this.”

“I know,” I said, staring up until it stopped feeling like up at all.