This winter has brought some spectacular snowfalls, and walking down the street is a different experience every other day. One learns to remember where the ice patches are, so that even under layers of snow, you remember where you have to slow down and be conscious of where your next footstep could safely take hold.

The cars that drive by mercilessly press down on the snow in the middle of the road. We conquer you, say the wheels to the snow. But the snow does not feel compelled to reply, and simply expels a soft lingering whisper that sounds exactly like waves at sea on a calm summer's day. The snow banks on either side of the pavement resemble sand dunes, except they are bleached white by winter; their slightly rougher texture makes them glow and glitter under the orange of the sodium street lamps. But every time there is a snow storm I dream of walking on warm, hot sand, the familiar feeling of each step sinking in, absorbing the featherweight of my body, my lightweight sense of self.

I like the winter. I like to say: I chose to live here - even for a little while. I find myself taking it for granted that I walk out of my front door completely wrapped up against the elements, and it hits me every now and again that I'll never be able to accurately describe this experience to my childhood friends from the tropics. "It's like sand ... except, white, and very cold. Melts when you touch it. Sparkles at night. Oh yes, and sometimes it even gets too cold to snow ..." Maybe all I want to say is, "It makes you feel alive because you are constantly reminded of your humanity," but that's altogether too abstract and too vague because I would have to explain why that mattered.

We didn't choose to be born, and somehow, this most often translates into a kind of psychosis that also implies we can't choose how to live our lives, or how we can't influence life around us. Destinies are complex, obscure and shrouded by myths, so it is much easier to not care and pretend our lives are individual little private hives of activity - that your life does not relate to mine if I didn't know your name and if we didn't share the same blood. And so in the metro everyone wears their earphones in forced blissful ignorance, in the subconscious collective bid to isolate ourselves. People drive cars because it is a convenience - but really, a convenient way to create their own, isolated, individual universes, moving towards a destiny they imagined they chose even if the pattern had been laid out by those who came before us. In the streets, strangers pass by one another as mere shadows.

At one point on my way home, there was the depanneur's delivery bike in the middle of the path flanked both sides by snow banks, so I had to negotiate my way carefully between the big white bucket in front of it and the big white pile of snow to one side. The deliveryman was coming down a flight of stairs carrying a big box of empty beer bottles, and we bade each other "Bonsoir!", which, tonight, strangely meant both "hello" and "farewell".