# 1 Beginnings.

I have never been one to want for things that are in any way possible. I am told that this makes me a difficult person. An interesting concept.

Difficult. By all accounts, this penchant for impossibility paints me with the same brush - a vibrant red in colour so as to prevent camoflage, of course - as a purple-faced child in the depths of a tantrum.

I am the screw that has seized to the iron...the adulterous marriage...the breech pregnancy...the left hand writing awkwardly.

This is implied with an insincere jocularity that I uncomfortably despise. One can never comfortably hate something that insinuates inferiority.

Today I long for snow. The element of ludicrity in this is that it is summer.

The others think me strange. They enjoy the weather...the air that breathes like molasses and curdles at the touch. They don't seem to mind the stench; the sweat that seeps from every slackened pore to butter them up for a mid-morning frying. The heat is always unbearable by ten.

Anything can be braved for weather that permits swimming and barbeques, they tell me.

I hate it.

Right now, I am thinking about the large, weathered thermometer hanging up on the side of the garage. Sometimes the boys use it to test the temperature of the pool, or when they're a little drunker, of their beers or their mephitic armpits. But me, I'm just thinking about how much I'd like the fickle, red taper to collapse upon itself.

Snow. The mere thought of the word makes me ripple with satisfaction.

There is something positively heavenly about mountains. The very idea of ascending a monolith so obviously susceptible to a humanly transmogrified nature is thrilling to me. But more than that, I think the element of ice and I are far more suited to one another...huddling in an open chairlift at the centre of a tunnel of snow-capped trees seems to please the perpetual ache I am yet to cure myelf of.

It is tantalizing. And alas, it lies out of my reach...is still 7 months away.

And 7 months is such a long, long time.