My January 1st morning

How do you actually describe it coherently. I left downtown Montreal soon after the metro opened, at 6 something AM. Already a number of people were lining up at the bus stop for the 211, probably people partying all night, or perhaps working all night. I don't know. But it was very cold outside. The night before was a cold one - not as cold as it gets late January, February, but certainly colder than what we're experiencing today and yesterday.

I slept on the bus soon after it got on the expressway. I almost slept passed my bus stop, 30 minutes later, woke up right on time, just as the bus dropped the only other passenger to be dropped. Of course, there is no other bus to bring me home from that stop (b/c they start at 9:15AM on Sundays, and it was 7:15). So I started walking (b/c I'd freeze to death otherwise - even the McDonalds on the corner was not going to open before several hours), and walked 200m towards the train station, hoping that they kept it unlocked during the night (what folly).

I remember standing motionless for a bit. What a beautiful morning it was. Totally white from the snow that fell the night before, a bit of sunshine filtering between the clouds (but still a mainly cloudy and grey morning), the nostril-freezing cold. The pores on my face were reservoirs of cigarette smoke gathered the night before. It would still stink, even after taking a shower.

For a while, I just stopped thinking about the cold, and started thinking about survival, or, what if I wasn't going to find a warm place to stay and just freeze to death, and then I thought of the homeless people who go through not wearing anything nearly as warm as what I was wearing (a long black coat, with a thick wool scarf). I wasn't going to die, but it'd be a long two-hours - if a taxi didn't drive by just 5 minutes of waiting on the side of the boulevard.