Winter Whispers, Stupid Songs

The morning slaps me awake with a frozen windscreen, keys in hand, scraping frost like I’m chiselling through someone else’s mistakes. My breath hangs in the air, a ghost of myself mocking the effort. The cold flirts cruelly with my cheeks, leaving them raw, only for the radiator’s blast to burn them out of spite. The heating bill waits in the wings, a villain in this pantomime. “Put on another jumper,” I mutter, as if wool could conquer capitalism. Blanketed, I surrender to films where faces blur into a tinsel-coated déjà vu – different eyes, same dialogue, happy endings so loud they drown out my cynicism. Stupid Christmas songs screech their hollow cheer, and I let them. They’re easier to hate than my own thoughts. But the air is so fresh it cuts clean through the noise. For a moment, the world feels lighter – even the weight I carry shrinks to something I can hold in my hands, turning it over like snowflakes, watching it melt into the brittle calm of this season.