Underestimated.

The frigidity in San Francisco is unlike any bluster my tippy toes have ever felt.

I must really start wearing socks.

This murderous cold chills so deeply that I'm unsure of its origin--whether the freeze comes from without or, most likely, from within. Each gust of air brings with it a wind chill factor an octave lower than the prior, a sharper set of teeth ready to puncture my skin to bone to soul. I trudge on with recalcitrance, upstream, eyes seared shut due to the caustic qualities of the wind's undertow.

I may be going somewhere scary, a place people fear, where they get material for nightmares. It's a place where no one ever wants to go and if they end up there, it's usually only by force. It is a place of deep loss and pain, the kind that bleeds dry and doesn't clot, the type that never goes numb and rarely ever heals completely.

I'm on my way, so sure I'll make it out alive, though near-fatally wounded. Perhaps, in the direst of straights, the lowest levels of the inferno, this chill will be thawed and, again perhaps, I will finally open my eyes.

Life must not only be lived but loved as well.