Since most of my readers live in a 30-mile radius, you all know that I survived Blizzard Brianna. I hate when blizzards are named. It’s a snowstorm. Stay inside and you’ll probably be okay. Hurricanes deserves names – they’re massive storms capable of real and significant destruction. The blizzards in the midwest haven’t been very bad for the last few decades.

That being said, Thursday was still a terrible day to be driving, but I went to work anyway. My twenty-five minute commute turned into an hour-long drive, mentally writing my father a thank you note for letting me borrow his four-wheel drive Durango. I joined the majority of the office by leaving at noon. I spent most of the afternoon on the couch reading Calvino. But by about four, I was bored and ready to do something.

While driving to work that morning, I had seen a girl walking in the snow. She wore a peacoat, thick scarf, and a cozy hat. It reminded me of when I lived in Milwaukee. I used to listen to a lot of sad bands like The National. Whenever it snowed, I’d set the discography on my ipod to shuffle to walk the seven or eight blocks to campus. On the way, I’d muse in the most melancholic of fashions – noting how beautifully sad the sagging porches of college houses looked. I would imagine myself going into the Russian foods store and telling the clerk I wanted to try the vodka-filled chocolates I’d heard about. Sometimes I’d daydream about bumping into a handsome stranger at the laundrymat, both of us completely unaware of the obvious meet cute we were part of. Inevitably, these thoughts would be cut off as soon as I remembered they were either disgustingly sentimental or completely improbable. Then I would feel sorry for myself and focus instead on how the singer’s voice sounded the way I imagined whiskey would. Then I congratulated myself on such a clever description.

So I decided to bundle up and take a walk to a coffee shop about a mile away. I made a playlist of Damien Rice, matt pond PA, and Minus the Bear (because seriously, what else do you listen to during a blizzard?). It was a really beautiful experience, traipsing through the snow and feeling the cold sting of flakes pummeling my cheeks.

The coffee shop ended up being closed anyway, but I didn’t mind. The purpose of the walk was to push myself into a happy melancholia. And it worked. I was enchanted by everything: the starry headlights of skating cars, the frosted elegance of tree branches coated in crunchy snow, and the shimmery gusts flying beneath streetlights.

An hour and 1.5 miles later, I was across the street from a thai restaurant, considering curry for dinner, when I realized I lost my debit card somewhere in the snow. Instead of freaking out and telling the world to fuck off, I just called my bank and canceled my card. I’ll just have to wax nostalgic while I write checks for the next ten days.

It might not look like it, but I was totally okay with having a runny nose.