I was impressed with the weather the other morning. The white unifying things usually the color of death. The snow was nothing like what they were calling it. Severe weather has too many “R”s in it.

I’m usually wrong about definite, hard consonants. The “R” is why we yell, “timber” and “four”—the sound carries. My predictions about weather, about reality, readily fail. When the weatherman said it was going to snow I said it wouldn’t happen. I predicted going to press class in the morning.

I waited for sleep that night, remembering I had tried once to break up with a girl I was never actually dating.

“Do I sound like an idiot right now?”

“Kinda,” she said.

I had thought she would know what I was talking about. Language consists mostly what of we thought before we heard the words themselves. Language is what kept me up later than I wanted to stay.

The two hour delay had already passed when I woke up at ten. I showered and dressed anyway in my windowless bathroom. The jeans I wore felt good.

My belt offers me the kind of security I lived for years without—the confidence exuded by men with leather through their loops. My pants sagged in the days I let confused girls down easy over the phone. Now buckles clank like nouns. I was always more about modifiers and gerunds.

I was the guy who got crushed by the tree, hit by the golf ball.

I walked through the falling snow, the salt crunching under the souls of my leather Wolverines. Two things I needed to take care of had struck me: the press class for which I unlock the door and direct discussions. And a committee meeting I needed to attend so I can ask the tough questions for the people.

My body was all dried up from having just gotten up. Ice collected on the toe of my boot. The boots used to do same thing for me as my belt does now. They’re left over from a change in ideas, the days when Washington was about cowboys. I thought I could be one, too. Those were men with confidence.

I imagined myself, in these days, pants firm around my waist, opening my remarks with “Mr. President.” He could have shouted “Timber” out at an anxious nation. That could have been something solid. But his whole movement died before I even knew what it was.

My blue sweatshirt was collecting crystals that melted in my heat.

No one stood outside the newsroom door. The writers had all heard the delay was changed to a cancellation. I turned back out into the snow and watched as the parking lot stayed empty. I was thirsty as I walked to Lynch Hall. There, the committee meeting was canceled. No committee-people to ask questions, no president. No rhetoric to question except my own inner monologue.

I bought an orange juice at the Bobcat on my way back and drank it loudly. My apartment was silent when I arrived. I unlooped my belt and unlaced my boots. I slid back into bed like this all was a whole day that never happened. The snow kept falling and melted off my clothes and boots while I slept.

I’ve come to understand that everything in my life is language. Even the objects and people seem to rise up and fall back into nothing—I surround myself with the things I want to hear. Those things are never completely wrong, sometimes wrong enough. I’m hearing for the sounds that carry.