When winter rolls around, everything gets heavier. The clothing, the backpacks, the layers of shit—emotional and the Target clothing department. People flip-flop between ready-for-spring and hot-chocolate-sipping-blanket-consumed-I-hope-it-stays-cold-forever-bring-on-the-ice-age.

No one is ever ready for “the change” from then to now and now to then. But we all get there anyway. We’re thrown into it.

I was shoving quarters into dollar-twenty-five washing machines at the laundromat when I was 15, hating everyone for being stuck there (my mom, my brain cells, the people who dispense Tide laundry detergent).

I had made it most of the way through the Hell of blue jeans and dirty shirts, when the bell shook at me from the doorway. I didn’t look until called on. Too busy counting change and listening to some guy on My Strange Addictions talk about dating his car and the wonders of the exhaust pipe.

The man who had walked through the door shivered loud, cleared his throat, and asked me if I was doing laundry for my kids. I turned around. He looked me up and down but stared past me to nowhere at the same time.

He had to have been in his late 40s at the youngest, and his clothes looked anything but new. They looked like the clothes people ditch to foreign countries for people in need.

The clothes no one wants to wear but no one is quite ready to call worthless enough for the garbage-bag-abyss so they label them charity.

His breath shook and he shook as he started telling me about his life. About how cold it was. About his daughter who wouldn’t talk to him and his old lady who wouldn’t talk about him. I kept sliding quarters with my thumbs behind my back while he pleaded: “Kiss me. Please. Just one kiss. I’m so lonely. It’s all so lonely. Can’t you see it? Just kiss me.”

Something about him made me want to give him everything behind my back. Part of me wanted to run. Wanted him to run. Wanted the world to spin us apart, to suck the laundromat up and take the money with it. To take me somewhere warmer.

But I was stuck and he was stuck. And the world was jammed still for just a second. The paper souls got caught in the machine and I came out a little stained. A little folded in.

Every time it hits 20 degrees, every time I drive past that laundromat, I am reminded “it’s so lonely.” I’m reminded that a quarter gets a dryer hot for 35 minutes, but bills and bills can’t warm us for any longer than it takes to swipe the debit card. To slip the new department-store-sweaters on. That the only things setting me and that man apart were Hollister jeans and a comb.

I wonder if he ever got that kiss. Ever got unstuck from that corner of his universe.

If, when it happened, he made it out of the then to the now alive.