It was one of those nights when, coming down from WRCU, I tottered precariously on the icy slope behind the station and started to wonder exactly how loudly one would have to scream for someone in Drake to hear the cries for help, and just how quicky hypothermia would set in if one were lying on the ground outside in the cold with a broken leg, and how often campus safety actually drives by during the night anyway, and what sort of state one would be in by the time people started walking around in the morning and noticed an injured person lying there on the ice. Those nights happen just a little too often in the winter. (Nights when I wonder those things, I mean, not nights when I actually fall on the ice and break my leg and lie there waiting for help until morning.)

Once I got down the hill, though, it was just lovely. The paths hadn't been plowed and the snow had blown over them so that if it weren't for the line of lights extending out to Broad Street, I wouldn't have known that a path was there at all. This is how winter is supposed to be, with frequent snowfall always covering the ugly plowed edges of streets and the wind constantly smoothing over the paths so that each person believes that their tracks are the first to break the snow.

Also, is it strange that I find it so hard to differentiate between people existing in their real form and the myths I create about them in my head? For people, though they have their predictabilities, are so unlimited and free-flowing that to set them down with words or description cannot possibly truly capture them, so that at the moment I am capable of laying down their characteristics in my mind they have already become inaccurate or at least on the brink of inaccuracy. And so I create these myths of words and ideas, but they are merely shadows, shapes, stencils, silhouettes at best. To see the person one may use these as stepping-stones, but must eventually leave them behind. And that is the essence of postmodernism, as I understand it -- to use these sketches as tools, to help us sort out ideas in our minds, is okay, but the goal is always to see not the patterns and the boxes but the infinite variance from all our categories.

But what is it to love a person? Do I love this image, the version of the person that lives in my head, my conception of their fundamental characteristics? Or can I reach beyond it and toss the words away to love the unpredictability, the uncategorizable, the very essence of the person? And can I always be sure which I am doing?