dear internet,

every year around this time i begin to dream of snow. i've done this for years; i can track the phenomenon through wordpresses and tweets and handwritten journals. it is one of my greatest unfulfilled yearnings, that i've never lived in a place with a proper snowy wintertime. even december in delhi, which does have the concept of winter, can feel like a cruel trick, to know that a car drive away the mountains are christmas-card picturesque, and all the city will ever get is a dull, looming smog. 

at first my dreams of snow were a desperate thing, like being thirteen and wishing on mailvans to fall in love. but over the years they've become constant as a season. before i wake up i can feel the weather change, the sky go dark and then light; i see my breath in the air, and generally, when the snowfall begins, it is just on a patch of grass near where i'm standing, and sometimes it snows just as i'm leaving a city; both of these are true to the only times i have, for brief hours, experienced snow in real life. when i write it down i know it sounds sad, this ersatz winter, this facsimile of snowfall. but when i wake up to my air-conditioned bedroom in a city whose temperature never drops below twenty-four celsius, i'm mostly not sad.

this year i watched the family stone for the second time, but it felt like the first time, because although i recognised enough to know that i have in fact watched the film before, i didn't remember anything important. i loved it a lot, which i didn't expect. my favourite scene—and i hope this isn't a spoiler, although probably you have seen the film before too—involved two characters singing repeat the sounding joy over and over again, in a way that made me feel complicatedly happy and wistful and sad. that's how i feel when i wake up from dreams of snow.

i didn't want to write a wrap-up or best-of or say anything remotely profound about [gestures wildly] all this, and so i won't. i'll watch when harry met sally tonight, and i'll fall asleep before midnight, probably, or take a selfie at 12 if i'm awake, which i do just to remind myself of how i started the year; and i'll see you all next week.

love,
t