Winter Unclothed
Copyright© 2026 by Kate Evergreen
Chapter 1: October 28th Feeling That Left
I used to think I knew what cold meant.
I used to think cold was a sensation, something that happened to your skin, something that made you shiver and pull your coat tighter and curse the Minnesota winter for being so damn relentless. I used to think cold was something you felt, something you fought, something you survived. I used to think the cold was temporary. I used to think it meant something.
I don’t think that anymore.
The first time I noticed it, I was walking to my car after a faculty meeting. It was late October, the year after the divorce, the year I stopped being able to feel much of anything at all. I had forgotten my coat. I remember that clearly, standing in the parking lot outside of Folwell Hall, realizing I’d left my coat in my office, and then realizing I didn’t care. The temperature was in the twenties. The wind was coming off the Mississippi like it was personally offended by the existence of the university. I walked to my car, my keys in my hand, my breath visible in the air, and I felt nothing. Not just emotionally. Physically. My skin registered the cold the way you might register a piece of information you don’t need. It was there, and then it wasn’t, and I didn’t think about it again until the next morning when I realized I still hadn’t picked up my coat.
I thought it was a shock, at first. The divorce was fresh. Fresh-ish. We’d been separated for eight months, but the papers had only been finalized for three. Sven had moved to Edina with his new wife, his new wife, who was younger and more agreeable and who didn’t have a philosophy degree that she refused to use for anything practical. I kept the house in Seward because it was mine before it was ours. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want the furniture, the books, the shelves that held the carefully organized papers of the dissertation he never finished. He didn’t want anything that reminded him of the person he used to be. I understood that, even though I didn’t like to admit it.
But the cold didn’t go away. It didn’t come back. The next winter, I walked to campus in a sweater when everyone else was wearing parkas. People asked if I was cold. I said no. They assumed I was being stoic. I wasn’t being anything. I was just being.
By the third year, I stopped wearing coats at all.
I don’t know how to explain this to someone who hasn’t experienced it. I don’t know how to make you understand what it feels like to walk through a Minnesota winter and feel only the memory of cold, the ghost of it, the way you might remember a song you used to know but can no longer hum. My skin is pale and unblemished. I don’t get goosebumps anymore. I don’t shiver. My blood doesn’t rush to my surface in desperate attempts to keep me warm. It just sits there, circulating or not circulating, doing whatever blood does, and I don’t ask it to do anything else. I have stopped asking my body to do anything it doesn’t want to do.
This morning, I woke up in my house in Seward. The house is cold. I never turn up the heat past sixty, but I don’t notice. I don’t notice the cold hardwood floor beneath my bare feet. I didn’t notice the draft from the windows that Ingrid complained about last week. I don’t notice anything except the sound of my own breathing, which has become the most reliable thing in my life. I am alive. I am breathing. I am going to go to campus and teach my Ethics seminar and pretend that I am present, the way I have pretended to be present for everything since Sven left.
My bedroom is spare. A bed, a dresser, a lamp. No photographs. No decorations. The walls are bare, the way I feel. I used to have things on the walls: art prints, a mirror, a painting my mother gave me, but I took them down during the divorce and never put them back up. I told myself I would repaint the room, find something I actually liked, something that felt like me. But I don’t know what feels like me anymore. I don’t know if I ever knew. I have spent forty-three years performing versions of myself for other people for Sven, for my colleagues, for my mother, for the students who don’t know and don’t care who I am and I have run out of the energy required to keep performing.
I walk to the bathroom. The mirror is fogged from the shower I took an hour ago. I don’t wipe it off. I don’t need to see myself. I know what I look like: forty-three, pale skin, dark blonde hair that I have given up cutting or styling, blue eyes that have lost whatever spark they used to have. My body is still reasonably fit. I walk everywhere, and I don’t eat much, h but I don’t care about it. It’s a container. It holds me. That’s all it does.
I dress in the clothes I’ve worn a hundred times before. A sweater. Slacks. Boots. A scarf that I wrap around my neck out of habit, not because I need it. I don’t need any of it. The clothes are costumes. They are the things I wear so that I look like a person, so that I can move through the world without being questioned. The costume is what makes me visible. Without it, I would be nothing. Without it, I would just be a body walking around, and no one would know what to do with a body that wasn’t performing anything.
I leave the house at seven-thirty. The sun is just rising, casting thin grey light over the snow-covered streets. Seward is quiet this time of morning. The houses are dark. The trees are bare. I walk past the corner store, past the church that has been closed for years, past the house where an old woman used to sit on her porch in the summer and wave at everyone who passed. She died two years ago. Her house is empty now. I think about her sometimes. I think about how she lived alone and didn’t seem to mind. I think about how she waved at people she didn’t know. I think about how she had a sense of connection to her neighborhood that I have never been able to find, even when I was married, even when I was supposed to be happy.
The walk to campus takes twenty minutes. I walk across the Washington Avenue Bridge, and I stop in the middle to look at the Mississippi. The river is grey and sluggish this time of year, the surface broken by small chunks of ice that drift slowly toward the south. I wonder where they’re going. I wonder if they know. I think about how easy it would be to stand here and just stop. To stop walking. To stop pretending. To stop being anything at all. I think about it, and then I keep walking, because that’s what I do. I keep walking.
Wilson Library looms ahead of me, grey and solid against the grey and solid sky. I walk up the steps, push through the glass doors, and feel the familiar rush of air that smells like old books and students and the faint chemical smell of cleaning products. I have been coming to this library for three years. Every Tuesday evening, I come here. The same seat. The same silence. The same retreat.
I started coming after the divorce. I was looking for something to do on Tuesday nights, something that would keep me out of the house, something that would fill the hours between the end of classes and the point at which I could go to bed and pretend the day was over. I found the library by accident, wandering through the stacks, and I found the seat by accident on a small table in the back corner, beneath the shelves labeled Literature and Philosophy. It was empty. It stayed empty. People walked past it, but no one ever sat there. I started sitting there, and somehow, without anyone ever saying a word, it became mine.
I don’t know why I like it. The window looks out at the river. The light is good in the late afternoon. The silence is complete. But that’s not why I came. I come because it’s the only place where I don’t feel like I’m performing. In my office, I’m a performing professor. In my house, I’m a performing tenant. In my classes, I’m a performing teacher. But here, in this corner, at this table, I am no one. I am just a body sitting in a chair, looking at the river, pretending to read a book. It’s the closest I have come to being real in three years.
I have been coming here every Tuesday evening for three years, and not once has anyone sat in the other chair. Until tonight.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s the whole day to get through first. There’s the seminar, and the meetings, and the papers I need to grade, and the conversations I need to have, and the performance I need to maintain. The performance. I’ve gotten so good at it that sometimes I forget I’m performing at all. Sometimes I forget that the person my students see, the person my colleagues see, the person my mother talks to on the phone every two weeks isn’t real. She’s a character I invented. She’s the person I thought I was supposed to be.
I walk across campus. The snow is starting to fall again, light and dry, the kind of snow that doesn’t stick but somehow makes everything colder. The students hurry past me, bundled in their parkas and their hats and their scarves. I’m wearing a sweater. That’s all. I’m wearing a sweater, and I don’t feel cold.
I don’t remember when I stopped feeling cold. I don’t remember the exact moment when my body stopped responding to the temperature. I can remember October when I walked to my car without my coat, and I can remember November when I walked to campus in a thin jacket, and I can remember December when I stopped wearing anything at all except the sweater I’m wearing now. But I can’t remember the moment when it happened. I can’t remember the moment when I crossed the line between being able to feel the cold and not being able to feel it. It was gradual. It was the same way I stopped feeling everything else.
My mother calls me every two weeks. She lives in Duluth, in the house I grew up in. She’s been there since she married my father, and she’s been there since he died six years ago. She doesn’t want to leave. She says the house is too full of memories. I think she’s right. I think the house is full of memories, and I think that’s why she stays. She needs to be surrounded by the things that remind her of who she used to be. I am the opposite. I have emptied my house of everything that might remind me of who I used to be. I have stripped it down to the bare essentials. I have made it as empty as I feel.
My mother doesn’t understand this. She calls and asks how I’m doing, and I tell her I’m fine, and she says she’s worried about me, and I tell her not to be, and we have the same conversation every two weeks, and nothing ever changes. She knows I’m not fine. She knows I haven’t been fine since the divorce. But she doesn’t know what to do about it, and I don’t know what to tell her, so we just keep having the same conversation, the same words, the same patterns, the same performance.
I don’t blame her. I don’t blame anyone. I don’t know who to blame. I don’t know if blame is the right word. I don’t know if there’s anyone to blame at all.
I walk into Folwell Hall. The building is old, the kind of old that makes you feel like you’re walking through history. The floors are creaky. The ceilings are high. The windows are tall and narrow, the kind of windows that let in the cold air in the winter and make you wish you were somewhere else. I teach my classes in a room on the third floor, a room that’s too small for the number of students I have, a room that’s always either too hot or too cold, a room that I have come to hate and love in equal measure.
The students are already there. Twenty-three of them, mostly juniors and seniors. They’re sitting in the small chairs, their laptops open, their notebooks ready, their faces expectant. They don’t know that I’m a ghost. They don’t know that the person standing in front of them is performing. They think I’m real. They think I’m a person. They think I’m alive.
“Good morning,” I say. “Today we’re going to continue our discussion of moral responsibility. I want to talk about the difference between responsibility and blame, and I want to talk about how we assign responsibility to people who don’t think they’re responsible.”
I look at their faces. They look back at me. They’re waiting for something. They’re waiting for me to say something that matters. I try to think of something that matters.
“Let me ask you a question,” I say. “If you stop feeling something, if you stop feeling the cold, for example, are you responsible for the fact that you don’t feel it? Or is it something that happened to you, something you had no control over?”
They don’t answer. They don’t know how to answer. I don’t know how to answer either.
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