This post is a bit belated. The weather has turned, we’re in the first stages of the glory days now. One finds oneself wanting to drink one’s bottle of beer outdoors, where sunset looks like paint-soaked gauze draped across the horizon. Sighs of relief are being let out all over town and homeless dudes are holding vivid morning conversations outside coffeshops.

I’m still thinking about winter. Here that means rain, although I don’t remember seeing very much of that this year. Certain weekends were wet, and they made an impact. They got their point across. Rain on the roof, rain on the skylight. Soaked cuffs at the end of a walk. A red umbrella that was just the right size for a solitary pedestrian, and a sentimental compilation created for the sole purpose of guiding me home through a downpour.

I have a feeling I won’t understand what happened to me this winter until some years have passed. If I didn’t have such a firm policy of refusing to read old journals, I might gain access to strands of logic, or (more likely) a pattern of obsessive-compulsive behavior that would relocate the phenomenon into a neat psychological category. But I’m relying on memory, not my lab notes, because intuition will save the day and faith will make itself scarce if things get too scientific.

I drank hot water. I spent most of my time alone. There was a lot to think about.

For example, being alone. I got to think about that. Being alone was what I wanted. A cherished dream ever since a crowded childhood, being alone came true in new and brilliant ways this winter. Relationships were shifting. Boundaries were defining themselves. Sanity came together and fell apart, then came together again over morning coffee and a boring to-do list. The world almost ended in the middle of the night about a hundred times, but without any other witnesses. When it was time to go to work the damage was nearly undetectable.

Then who could resist the morning frost on the tracks? Who could succumb to chaos when the trees by the river clung to shadows and wouldn’t release them and the streetlights were ghostly? For part of that time I had a camera, a meter for ethereal qualities I’d otherwise miss. I felt sane, taking pictures, and even after the camera broke I felt that my concrete morning observation justified the spiritual excesses of the night before.

I am alone, I thought. I can unravel my entire personality and put it back like it never was before and as long as I show up on time to do my job, nobody is the wiser. Nobody can complain that I’m inconsistent or elusive or cold, at least nobody I have to share my space with.

When the rain fell in torrents, the puddles got bigger and parking lots were slick. I walked home listening to music and the smooth forward motion hypnotized me until I cried like a little kid, staring at the wet black pavement and thinking of my brother. Which anyone would, if their brother had drowned around this time of year, the puddles and the dripping gutters serving as perennial reminders of the kind of weather that finally washed his body up to the surface of a river from where it was trapped in the long tangly weeds four years ago. Unbelievable that it could be true, that years have not undone this fact. But there it is. Still true.

That crying little kid didn’t want to understand how it happened, just wanted to be with the missing person, that first friend in the world whose reckless tendencies inspired such a potent mixture of terror and excitement. So I became, this winter, an underwater swimmer in those rainstorms, at least for as long as it took to walk home from work in the dark. After taking apart my ego during a dull eight hours at the office, I fell into the depths on my way home. I was a fish lurking near his body. I was his six-year-old big sister racing underwater with him at a state park.

If he’s gone, but I feel like I’m with him, then what does that mean? I wondered. Gently, abstractly, with tears that didn’t cut ruts into my face like the first ones did. I imagined myself to be below the level of human emotions, floating through one day after another for weeks on end. Curled up into myself, locked inside an unchanging world. Invisible. Content at last, even safe.

But it turned out I was not alone after all. Someone else floated invisible (to the naked eye, anyway). This person could not be ignored. While I wept and reached for transcendant realizations, he silently formed his tiny nervous system inside my sister’s body, this person who’s still working out the details as I write these words.

In the bookstore, I relished the thought of being lonely, just a paranoid nothing. She pointed to photos in books and said “that’s what he looks like now.” And all my solipsistic arrogance failed at the sight of translucent flesh in its womb-world. I stared at my sister for a second and looked away, shocked and moved beyond words.

We’re getting another chance to meet someone precious, to be vulnerable and hopeful and to feel our throats constrict with too much love. My sister has opened herself completely to this love. I’m astounded. Is it the natural effects of pregnancy on her mind and body, or is it her own courage and good humor that allow her to love so bravely?

She’s got the facts on the tip of her tongue, she’s letting the sun shine on her belly up there in the woods where she lives. The dad-to-be can install windows with his eyes closed and play Chopin on the piano at the end of the day. The rest of us are still adjusting to the news.

It’s just that the whole thing seems so perilous. Some people get pregnant after years of preparation involving advanced degrees and mortgages. Some people get pregnant and don’t tell anyone about it until years later. It’s not the money or the health that make it seem perilous to me, it’s the emotions. To open up one’s life and invite in this person, someone whose every cell will become indispensable to one’s happiness for years to come, that takes some nerve, no matter how you go about it.

I had fantasies of becoming invisible somehow, the kind I always have. If-you-can-leave-then-I-can-leave-too kinds of fantasies. I-don’t-have-to-be-a-big-sister fantasies.

You-can’t-make-me-love-you fantasies.

But little invisible one, I think you can make me love you. Whoever you turn out to be.