The first sun in months reappears over the horizon at a low angle and finds everyone standing exactly where the long dark left them. Ice cracks in the bay at irregular intervals. Old assumptions stop bearing weight without warning.
Shadows cast again for the first time in months. The mind, which had stopped using them for orientation, misreads them. Objects appear further away than they are, and then much closer.
The routes that held through the whole winter begin to fail one at a time, without announcement, beneath familiar weight. This is the first lesson of the thaw: what held is not what holds.
A six-hour golden hour, a two-hour sunset that never quite commits. The amber that bleeds into every photograph of this season is not nostalgia. It is the geometry of a star that never climbed very high.
It is not warm. It is less cold. It is not day. It is less night. The entries from this season return obsessively to the word almost — Limbo's word, the one that describes the virtuous who did not quite make it in.