Baby, It’s Cold Out There (BACK, CLOSED)

A couple weeks ago, I finally finished a project that has been at least a year or two in the making.  While writing my senior honors thesis (a work of fiction that takes the reader through a girl’s life as she tries to find ways to co-exist with a father who died a couple weeks after her birth), I was thinking about books jackets as literal jackets or layers clothing that someone might put on or take off at any point in their lives.  In this piece, each layer or “jacket” represents one of the 18 years in Lyssa’s life (although I only made jackets for 8 of the more intriguing years, for practical purposes) and each has cutouts that reveal parts of the jacket underneath, or the year before, it: the past is visible in the present, is visible in the future.  This story to me is all about time and our bodies and what we choose to conceal and reveal, both in our heads and outside of them.  At the same time, there is also the idea that you put on a jacket when it’s cold, or take it off when it’s hot.  Lyssa is a character who seems to have very clear associations to temperatures, especially extremes like hot and cold.  And yet, I think there are times when the two blur together.  By the end, it’s a modern “Icarus and Daedalus” story.  To her, the sun is hot and the water is cold, so she thinks: I like the cold, it reminds me of my father, I choose the water.  But you still die.  In both extreme instances, you die.  There has to be some in-between and she has to find that.