Someone in a police uniform is speaking sternly from the television. "What people don't realize is that a frozen river isn't like a pond or a lake. An icy river, no matter how deep the ice seems to be on top, has a current flowing underneath it. That means that the ice is never the same thickness from one place to another. Eddies and swirls create thick and thin spots that can be only inches apart."

One of her colleagues is suiting up in a dry suit, which looks strangely like the spacesuit worn by the doomed astronauts in the movie 2001. Rubber gaskets seal the loose waterproof shell at his wrists, neck, and ankles. In the drysuit booties his feet appear tiny, and pointed, like he's preparing to perform a delicate ballet upon the fragile ice.

We walk out onto the frozen Potomac. The police officer is secured by a rope umbilicus threaded through a loop attached at waist level. The ice seems unshakably solid, like slick cement. In some places we see evidence of fault lines and tiny upheavals, frozen scars where the surface melted, split, and rejoined. From the center of the river we can look into the heart of the city of monuments, white statues to the honored dead. Faces set as if always in a winter wind. It is a rare view to stand atop the frozen artery looking back at the city. Our home is as peaceful and unknowable as a cadaver.

Then the young police officer stamps a few times on the ice and plunges through. Dark water and ice shards swirl up to his hips. Someone on shore takes up the slack on his safety rope. He has an expression of wonder, pleasure, although even through the drysuit the water must be almost intolerably cold. Perhaps then it sets in, because he suddenly heaves himself back onto the ice, using the lifeline to guide and steady himself as he bellies away from the ragged hole and finds his feet again. He looks a little bit wobbly, a newborn animal, and we know his legs must be nearly numb from their immersion in the frigid river. But he immediately begins stomping around again, and in moments he has located another place where the churning mind of the river has reached a liquid finger up towards the light beheld through the lens of the icy sky.

He falls through, this time almost to his chest. He looks back at the graying marble monuments spanning the edge of the frozen river. He cannot feel his legs at all. The rope tugs against him, but he doesn't move.

One day in early winter my mother was walking around her frozen pond when her dog strayed out on the ice and fell through. He was trapped in a hole in the middle of the pond, and without thinking much about it she plunged in after him, smashing ice ahead of her until she reached him, then dragging him back to the edge. She could easily have died doing this, and slipped beneath the surface of the water, where come nightfall the ice would have healed over the wound she had made, sealed her in solid and perfectly preserved with her dog. I doubt she would have been found for days, maybe longer. Someone would have had to walk out on the ice, listening for the thunderous bass chord or high crackling of danger, and look down at their own feet to see her there.

There are a few things that may fall between us, wondrous and accidental things that create bonds we cannot easily undo. I am coming to understand that many of my most intense friendships are founded in trauma shared or witnessed. I have drifted apart from many of those people, but a death, a time of pain, the sight of the bones of the world laid bare, create around me a community of ghosts. Threads connect us that I simply cannot untangle. These forces act upon our relationships and transform them, revealing a glipmse of the wonder and burden of endlessness.

I watched Barbara and Jim sing with old friends at their New Year's Eve party and thought: Music is one of those forces. They continue to be friends with people they've known for decades, and I found myself envious at of the endurance of their relationships. When your bonds are founded in strife, the slow process of healing seals the relationship behind you like a wound. But music goes on, and as I watched them sing around the piano I considered other things that forge enduring bonds between people. Chess, perhaps, and religion. Nothing I'm particularly good at.