Sometimes the Axis is a Real Asshole
The axis was bent against my favor for an entire year. Leaning away from any comfort of warmth, it was twelve months of the worst season; where the sun dips early from its low place on the horizon, sinking deeper until the majority of days are spent in the dark. Fuzzy socks tip toe on chilled hardwood, the feet inside them attached to goose-bumped bodies.
In my homeland of Alaska, I knew the cold. Lotion was stocked up for those drier months when skin cracks crevasses splintering across the body. No stranger to layering or the absence of vitamin D, I had always been prepared when the light went somewhere south and took the warmth of our coveted summer months with it. I remember buying my first SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) light and giving it a thousand-yard stare until my mom yelled at me to not look directly into its manufactured luminosity. This was not a choice.
My parents were impoverished kids out of the Midwest and moved to Alaska on a dream. My father, a recently graduated college student, landed in Anchorage on a crisp October morning during a layover on his way to Japan. It was the type of morning Alaskans are kin with, when the sun burns that last oil of summer and the unknowing and naïve young man would think there were some good days left. The wiser of us know that winter will come stinging. He decided to stay. A few years later, his young bride joined him. They joke that they moved to Alaska to get out of the cold, laughing to each other with the bond of the chillier Wisconsin nights of their own childhoods that seemed to have crept through their homes worse than the ones of my Alaskan upbringing.
I was merely a consequence or the outcome of a summer night — sometime around July if you count nine months back. My tiny body was greeted by the sun, a springtime baby. Maybe it was my own birth that predisposed me to a love of all things sunny, bright, orange, and warm. That or the depression that has crept down through my family tree and finds me rendered useless and bedbound some months. It almost goes without saying, but I don’t like winter. There is nothing alluring to me about hard nipples, snot running down my face, or being in a place where nostril ice crystals are a thing. Never again do I want to plug my car in so it can start in the morning, nor do I want to trash a credit card scraping the stubborn frost off the windshield.
The forecast when I moved to Sydney, Australia promised the heat my body knows to be the best kind: slightly humid, sweltering hot. I had planned to lizard out on the rocky cliffs that hug Bondi Beach, burning my skin to the second degree, leaving a sea salt scented tan on my Italian body. Instead, I was greeted by what the flight attendants called, “the worst storm in a century”.
Navigating a new country is hard. Mix in a foreign accent, torrential downpours, and gale force wind and it’s nearly impossible. I shared the bottom apartment of a dilapidated turn of the century house in Sydney’s Rose Bay neighborhood with two girls, one from New Zealand and the other from England. Three different versions of English rang through the halls while rain beat down on our windows, keeping us inside until our jobs forced our boots into the rivers that had taken over the sidewalks. I had packed shorts and sundresses for my six month stay and found myself in a mall, replacing them with sweatpants and hoodies.
Six months of darkness followed by six months of rain. Alaska to Australia. I swear the sun had given me the cold shoulder. My mom called to ask if the Opera House was as beautiful as it was in photos and I replied, “I don’t know; I haven’t looked up from my feet.” She was as disappointed as I was. There were areas of the roads covered with disheveled and broken umbrellas, “umbrella cemeteries” is what I later learned they were called. My depression became worse, no umbrella was wide enough to hide me from its wrath.
It was the year without summer. The year without the months winter had promised. There was no reason for suffering if not for the long, midnight sun days of those summer months, but I had been swindled. It was the darkest year of my life.
I moved to Southern California a while ago now. Time runs differently here. The days seem to bleed into each other, all with heat, sunshine, and an optimism that hadn’t existed before becoming permanent. But the people are different. When solstice came and the sun allowed for the longest day of play, there was no laughter or celebrating; only people moving in their cars, stuck in traffic, complaining about how their leather seats burned. You can’t appreciate the sun when it is constant. Sometimes I miss the rain.
