Hot Girl Winter

I have a vivid memory of walking down an ice luge of a sidewalk to celebrate my twenty-first birthday at a bar that looked droopy and gray during the daylight hours. Being a February baby, I envy those of you who can do outdoor activities without the risk of frostbite on your respective birthdays. It doesn’t feel fair. I should be entitled to compensation or something. 

Prior to this momentous midnight journey to the bar, we pregamed at my apartment with a round of White Russians, which I can’t imagine doing today because I’m almost forty and I have acid reflux. Leave my house? To be in public? After 8:00 PM? No thanks. 

I remember I bought a silky red halter top at the mall and wore my best low-rise jeans and a pair of high heels, possibly also red but my memory doesn’t serve me. I didn’t wear a coat on the half block walk—no self-respecting woo girl wore a coat to a bar in February. You can’t lose yourself on the dance floor to Lil John if you’re in a coat. Coats were for cars, for later, when your least drunk friend took you through the Taco Bell drive-thru. 

For roughly a decade, when I still “went out,” the dress code for winter was the same. Going out top, no coat, short skirt. Feet disfigured in the cheapest material footwear, toes frozen, balls of feet numb. We would shut the bar down and upon leaving, our teeth were chattering and our lips were blue and our skin was unmoisturized and pale and the wind funneled down the center of Main Street and straight up our Wet Seal bodycon dresses. But we were hot. And so it went with every bar outing for the rest of my twenties. 

I have a fond memory of a thirty-something (which seemed ancient to me at the time) bartender I worked with telling me, “This doesn’t last forever,” and I laughed it off. I was going to be young forever, dancing the night away with plastic cups of cheap beer in my hand and arch cramps from my Payless shoes.  

Despite my rejection of his wisdom, it didn’t last forever, and in a lot of ways I don’t mourn that change. Walking to bars from shitty apartments without a care in the world, spending my dollar tip money on drinks, and being reckless—even when it was subzero—was uncomfortable most of the time. Because being a hot girl during the cold season involves a degree of suffering. 

Recently, I went out to dinner with my college friends during a below-zero snap, the only one we’ve had in this short and absent winter, and one of them asked the group chat, are we going for comfy or cute? I harkened back on the days when comfy wasn’t even an option. Warmth? Never heard of her. We’d rather hug our arms to our chests and barrel through a snowstorm becuase we wore our business-casual peplum blazers with three-quarter sleeves made out of bottom tier polyester, and everyone needed to see us in them. We chose option C for our dinner date—warm. Donning gorgeous knee-length coats, hats, and scarves, all so we could sit together and drink cocktails and eat brick oven pizzas in a chilly and maybe a little too loud restaurant and be in bed by ten. 

And you know what? We looked sensational.

Maybe growing up and growing older isn’t all that bad after all, because I will never, ever choose cute in favor of warm again.