A crisp white cloud, when we breathe out. Winter is here. No one says it quite like that, so bluntly. No one wants to admit we haven’t had a summer, here. I know only because my brother asks for my scarf. How do I look? Do I look okay? He tugs nervously at the zip of his black jacket. Large, despite being only Small. He wears nothing but my father’s XL shirts, hanging from his body like a sheet from a small child at Halloween. Despite his best efforts, it makes him look younger, more fragile. He shuffles agitatedly. He is off to see a girl. I know this despite his Red Herring - I’m meeting Jack in ten. There are some things an older sister knows better than a mother. I remember being fourteen better than she does.

My sister started college this month. She carries a second hand SLR around with her, captures people and places with satisfyingly chunky clicks. Her first project title is Autumn. This is wrong. We don’t have autumn in England, not any more. When it is not winter the wind blows a permanent April our way. Fifty five percent of my year is overcast.

Joe and I are wrapped up in coats, walking towards the bus stop where I will have to leave him with his sausage roll and his duffel bag which has been weighing him down since he left the house.

(We were. Right now, right this second, he is sitting on a plush train seat cover. Dark blue with primary coloured squares and triangles. Black coffee on the table, available scrolling across the little glass panel above him, the Lake District flashing past. In front of him he has my pages of last November’s work, the 50,000 words I slaved to get down on time. No one has seen this before. It has plot holes like dried wells in a drought. Unfixable. Not with the biggest shovel could I fill them out, patch them up.)

If we froze this image, there would be things missing. My hands are not wrapped around a steaming styrofoam cup of coffee, entwined around our necks are no woolly scarves. Our cheeks are not as rosy as they should be, given the cold. We are tired, up too late making jokes and plans and love. Joe tries to separate the crisp white cloud of winter from the foggier smudge of cigarette smoke. I want to tell him his is a futile mission, and why now when I have to leave in five minutes?

It felt strange having him on my turf, to be in a place where parents were never far off. If anything, they were too close. Their shouts echoed up two flights of stairs, doors slammed with irritating irregularity. I told him I would rather die alone than be married to him for the rest of my life, my mother climbed the twenty nine steps to my room to tell me and Joe. When she’d gone I cringed into my duvet. The furious rows at top volume before I’d managed to escape, my sister’s tears, the verbal ping pong, none of it could be classed as the best behaviour my father had promised. Joe looked shell-shocked, shaken. We never had that with my family. And that was mild, compared to the words they fling at each other when outsiders are not around.

There is something about winter. Every last one is etched sketchily into my mind, each one develops a frosting of nostalgia. I must remember not to take this one for granted. This coming and going, the weeks of waiting, the furious throwing of words, I will want them back when they are gone.