WHEAT. 麦。

This is what you remember most about winter: nights charged with possibility, the electricity of youth coursing through your fingertips, quiet nausea at dawn, the horizon a bloody gash left raw and exposed to the brutality of the season. It’s red and stark when you stumble into consciousness. It’s tangerine-colored and brilliant like a fire in the northern hills of Los Angeles. But no, you remind yourself. At twenty-four, you’ve experienced an awakening. It pierces you with the singular clarity of the first sunbeam cutting across a February sky and into your eye. At twenty-four, you realize the life you have is preposterous, bewildering, endlessly gratifying. You wake up at seven a.m. because your body is restless and craving more. Daybreak hues lighten into a pale yellow. All you think about are relationships because these are what make life life, all you think about are people because they’re so perplexing and vapid and the only reason you wake up in the morning is people, and the only way you can endure the cold for months is people, and the only thing you want is to love them, and to know that you can move them in the same disarming way, with the same lithe enchantment, that they have done for you so carelessly. Like fingertips skimming water’s surface.