A short writing exercise based on Winter Winds by Mumford & Sons and the author’s emotions and struggles with seasonal depression.

Boots against a hardwood floor, creaking with age in the cold. The pine barrens feel even more barren in winter, especially when you’re all alone. Bonesaw wished they didn’t stand in such a situation.

The cold made it so that Rudy couldn’t make it to the cabin anymore, plunging Bonesaw’s already lonely section of the woods into a sort of isolated lull. Looking out the window felt like gazing into an unknown pocket dimension, away from time and space and everything else.

The doctor should’ve been used to it by now. Being a monster over 600 years old was the kind of thing that forced you to get used to being alone. Maybe if they already had no friends, it would’ve been easier, but the bright eyes of the people they’d given pieces of their heart to still shone in their mind, taunting them. If it weren’t so dangerous to go closer to town, Bonesaw would’ve marched right down there to go visit their friends… but towns nowadays tended to disagree with the cryptid from the woods.

Oh, well.

Sometimes your close off your heart, and sometimes your heart closes itself off. Even if they were in the face of warmth and laughter, Bonesaw didn’t feel so sure they could get their heart to turn back on. Winter always hollowed it out and froze it shut like an icy jack-o’-lantern, leaving them to spend the winter’s thinning of the veil alone and depressed.

But at least the wind still howled outside, perhaps filled with the cries of other lonely hearts asking to be loved even in the cold. The pine trees, glazed in snow, trembled like the figures of people moving ever-forward in search of warmth and safety, clutching at frigid air with fingers frozen at the tips. Bonesaw knew well what frostbitten fingers looked like.

The flickering light of the fire in the fireplace and the popping of the embers finally called Bonesaw away from their forlorn reverie, tearing their eyes away from the window and back towards the flames. Summer and autumn were no more, days dwindling into nights, and they would just have to accept that for the time being. All things turn, all things change, all things shift. That’s just how it is.

Time to turn off their emotions for the season and sink into the shadows of the firelight, no longer pondering the stars outside.