and all i ever wanted was to come in from the cold.

Freely I slaved away for something,
And I was bought and sold.
And all I ever wanted was to come in from the cold.

My memory is almost cruel to me. I remember pretty much everything. I remember the first time I met you. Go ahead, ask me. You probably won’t, but I will. I’ll remember what you wore and what I thought of you, and how that contrasts with now. I’ll remember the things you said or didn’t. I remember all those moments. They pile up in my brain like the letters and post cards my mother collects from me. She told me once she used to turn them over and touch them as if they were me in the room with her instead of who knows where, on the side of a road or in a tent. She traced every letter of my scrawl, my rushed x’s and o’s and sparse explanations. “Sky was so beautiful it hurt. Will be home in a month. xo” Those things I write down. The things she tells me that I can’t forget.

Mom never knew what to think of her wandering, willful, distant and dreadlocked daughter through mail, and face to face, I was a mystery. I would leave for weeks at a time, then come home, start school, go to work, come home, do my homework, and lay on my bed with headphones on and the door mostly shut. A cat would curl under my bent knees, and I would listen to a mix cd a boy I messed around with gave me. It was pretty average for the most part, lots of Rancid, my favourite band at the time, Stiff Little Fingers, awkward punk rock love anthems that people only sort of like because it’s novel a punk band is writing love anthems. But as if almost an afterthought, he tacked a Joni Mitchell song on the end of it. Come in From the Cold. The song is seven minutes and thirty seconds long, and it’s from the early 90’s. It was so strange it seemed hapless and calculated, so perfect for the weather and wrong for my age.

I listened to that song over and over through the winter. In my car to and from my crappy mall job, in my room, and in the shower. On my headphones between classes and in the library while doing my homework. That boy would run off that spring to go tree planting with a 15 year old traveler girl he met in Quebec city. I graduated and stayed put. Dour and silent as ever, drunk half the time.

These are the things I remember when I hear a stupid song on my iTunes I thought I deleted 3 years ago.