I never thought I’d actually say this but I don’t want to stay home anymore. I can’t stay at home anymore.

I just can’t do it anymore.

I can no longer tolerate spending day after day stuck inside my house. I didn’t know I could reach this level of desperation, but here I am.

Here I was at the beginning of January, excited for the snow to come. “I could really use a small break from school,” I said to myself. How could I have expected the winter weather to be as severe as it was?

Now there have been more snow days than I can handle.

When school gets canceled, I have to do something during the times I would normally be at school.

The roads are too hazardous to drive myself anywhere, so I have to utilize whatever sources of entertainment available.

Let me tell you from experience that a human being can only watch television shows for so many consecutive hours before they can’t take it anymore.

The cabin fever sets in and captures me in some strange altered state. As the time passes, I find myself feeling more and more like Tom Hank’s character in the movie “Cast Away”.

With no real form of human contact, I turn into a feral shell of the man I was before the loneliness withered me down.

The mild awkwardness I once spoke with regresses into the mumblings of a madman talking to himself only to preserve what little sanity still lingers within him.

I soon find myself unable to tell who I am anymore.

As the sun finally emerges days later, I shudder with fear at the thought of having to readjust to normal life.

How could I return to the normal life of the man I was before the snow fell? Before the isolation? Before any routine I had was disregarded by nature and I was thrust into an endless tundra of snow?

Will I ever reach the end of this vicious cycle of frozen precipitation?

I can never be truly sure, but I can’t let myself remain in that primitive state.

I gather my sanity and drag myself back out into the world of the sun. Back into the world of the living.

Eventually, as it does every year, winter fades into spring and the warm days erase the memories of the snowy ones.

Everything seems well again…at least until next winter.