The Warmth Leaving You

Step into a cold room and it feels like something is reaching for you — a substance, creeping in. Nothing is. There is no such thing as cold. There is only heat, and the lack of it, and you are a furnace quietly pouring yourself out into the world.

Heat is just movement — atoms jittering. The faster they jitter, the warmer the thing. "Cold" is simply slowness, stillness, the absence of that jitter. You never feel cold entering you; you feel warmth leaving you, flooding out of your skin into the cooler air, and your nerves report the loss as a chill.

Follow the stillness all the way down and you reach a floor: absolute zero, the temperature at which all jittering would stop entirely. It is the coldest anything can ever be — and the strange part is that nothing in the universe has ever quite reached it. Not the deepest void between galaxies. The cold has a bottom, and reality stays a hair above it, always.

You are not getting cold. You are leaking warmth into a universe that is patiently drinking it.

And if everything is always leaking heat — where is all that warmth going?