Numbing winter evenings. Streetlights ooze comfort and I can hear my heavy steps echoing in the empty area, and the cold breaths I leave pinch my cheeks, like an aunt reassuring me that things will be okay. The opaque dark settling around me isn’t upsetting but actually is quite soothing. It encaptures my every warm thought and offers it back almost as if it were a cocoon for me. A safe place. There’s something that makes me feel worldly in knowing that the dark, my reverberating footsteps, and the streetlights’ luminescence are the only things that are within striking distance. Shop windows seem to be made of thin wire and that if I were to go inside, the warmth I’ve found within the cold would vanish, a balance would be broken. They display thawed faces, that shine with sincerity. But I have no need to be thawed because I am content.
My fingers are numb and my core is sweating from the layers haughty mothers packed me into. Footstep after footstep, I make my way in this sheltering frost, my every sigh and gasp seem to be absorbed within the darkness. The dark almost seems alive. It loosens me as if every limb is attached to me by dental floss, and that if I were to scream my every secret, the dark would keep it. It rubs my fleece shielded back, holds my frozen hand, and whispers the wind into my ear like its trying to reciprocate my desires to tell it everything. I never feel lonely.
I contemplate the thought that within the dark of the evening that follows me home, there is light from the day that has passed. That snowmen, coffee cups, and sled races seemed to buried in the dark of soothing thoughts, cold nights, and several layers. To compare it to any other season would do it a great injustice, because while summer and spring leak meretriciousness with every hour, winter and fall seem to not mind their slight and embrace their dark with a sense of understanding. They understand that they hold something more valuable than soggy beachballs and itchy grass tickling your ankles.
Footsteps in the snow are what I live for. My tights smear against each other and my heavy boots leave heavy footprints on the ground through stacks of snowflakes. Snow seems weak but it lightens my every step with an undeniable sense of control and I feel empowered with every motion forward, it’s powerful. My school bag drifts along with the wind and almost seems to fly with the wind’s secrets and I laugh.
I laugh because I am safe. I laugh and the laugh joins the dark. I laugh and I am happy. Numbing winter evenings.