Gabrielle #34 – HeatTech

Scenes from a deep winter of the libido.

Sexy Beast (2000). Or; how I’m trying to be.

I’ve always hated the term “seasonal depression.” It sounds like a spice blend sold in a millennial-branded deli. Beyond that it feels like an unnecessarily medical description of a perfectly natural phenomenon. It’s fucking dark all the time, of course you’re miserable. Big light on at 3PM. Bedroom walls fully colonised by black mold. Skin dry from central heating. People hacking their lungs up on the bus like passengers across the River Styx. Full base layer of Uniqlo Heattech just to nip out for a Lucozade. Who wouldn’t be depressed?

Despite its associations with death, winter is not an erotic season. Not in Britain, anyway, for lifestyle reasons highlighted above. That’s what really bums me out, I think. Four months out of every year I walk around in a fog. Not sad, necessarily, but half asleep. Emotionally grey and sexually numb. It happens with such regularity it’s not even a cause for concern anymore; from the first week of January to the day the clocks go forward, pretty much, I’m done for. This year has been worse than usual, but only because there was a period over the summer where I flew too close to the sun, felt too good, went about like there was something burning me up from the inside, because there was. If you cut me, I’d bleed fire.