I’ve taken to walking out onto the balcony in as few clothes as possible now that it’s colder. Pants, shirtless, that sort of thing. It’s a strange sort of rush when it’s so cold that the body begins to tremble and I, inevitably, begin to lose feeling. Being that I am openly nostalgic and a closet sentimentalist, I use the time to consider the past and current events. Understandably, my most recent thoughts were about my grandfather. I conjured up a memory of him from my last visit, sitting on his bed and flanked by a daughter on either side. They were dressing him from the top down. A loose fitting flannel shirt and gray slacks; a belt cinched around his small waist. His tiny frame was so different from my own wide-shouldered and thick-trunked one that I wondered if we could even be related. I compared us to my own father’s thin, knobby body—one he was not ashamed to display on those tightey whitey mornings—and again, I had to wonder. Three generations of men whose lives have all been different in so many ways. I could not help but reduce us to the sum of our body parts for the sake of simplicity.
I also thought about the cold, namely that it was quite cold and I wanted to return inside. I thought about swimming. I wondered if a large beige and brown man can turn blue.