It was cliché to talk about being lonely while surrounded by people, so she didn't. Besides, the solitude was getting louder and easier to dance to, locked away in the cramped motel rooms with the slow internet. She simply waited, waited for something to happen. Something did happen. Snow. It came quietly, stealing in on tiptoe. One morning she woke up, and it was just there, unassuming and with little fanfare. It simply arrived, drenching the grey dirt of the city in a facade of clean and white and glittery. People brushed it off their cars, complaining about the choked up morning commute and the
flu they all had (though some didn't
realize it). Like freedom was a place to get to, the snow rushed on
through the city side streets and brick alley ways, emptying a path
through the “I'm fines” and “everything's okays.”
Forced to stay inside wrapped in layers
of blankets, she tried to write, but the words grew confused on the
page and refused to be sorted into neat left-to-right rows. Since
she began trying to force her very self into the ink, she had
realized that she had never known her heart at all. And so, she
decided to write about the snow. Designating a particular notebook
for this project, she wrote on the front in scrawled cursive “the
snow journal.” Every single day from the mild middle of December to
the raw, biting days of January, to the tentatively hopeful days of
February when the crocus shoots began peeking out the ground, she
chronicled the snow. Well, the precipitation, really, because during
the January thaw a driving rain killed the snow, and the resulting
muddy water swirled down into the city drains. Still, a few days
later, the cold was back and fresh new snow covered the dirt and dead
grass and cracked pavement.
By the time March came, she had stopped
worrying about putting her heart on paper, focusing instead on only
writing about the weather. On the day when the last patches of
lingering snow succumbed to the steady heat of the sun, she decided
to look back at the pages and pages of writing she had scratched into
the notebook. All of a sudden, everything came rushing back in a
torrent of thoughts and remembering and...heartbeats. All this time,
when she thought she had forgotten about her heart, she had been
discovering it. It was infused into the words, intertwined with the
ink swirls and dots and strokes; hiding beneath the grain of the
paper, peeking through strong and stronger as time passed.
Now she knew. It wasn't up to her
to try. She simply had to write about real things in an honest way,
and her heart would come along in its own good time.
+ a little piece of fiction that the recent snow brought on. But then again, maybe it's not entirely fiction.
