I saw our footprints in the snow today.
The tracks we left when the cold stung a little less. When the air felt less like a slap to the face and the snow was less like a straightjacket on the rotting grass. When winter wasn’t slushy roads and numbing cold, but rather a season I invited with open arms. I was a little girl with a heart thawed by devotion then, who had not given up her never-faltering faith that some things would be safe from the frost.
It is criminally unfortunate how much things can change in just a year.
Twelve months ago, maybe the dying summers and knives of ice would have seemed a little less daunting. Maybe the snowflakes would not have been a painful reminder, and maybe the seasons might have seemed a little less like they would end before I was ready. Everything was a little more predictable when I was still the child who was not blinded by the flurry of change and inconsistency.
But I lost a lot of her when you and I just became remembrances that would never repeat.
She is merely a memory that I replay in my mind when times like this come back around—when I spend the pitch-black evenings wondering what would have happened if I had seen it coming. I guess I must have forgotten that nothing is truly promised except for change. Nothing to depend on but a lack of stability. The seasons always switch, the weather always wavers, and yet I still find myself holding onto the hope that it will subside from its transmuting ways.
I find myself reaching for something that was never permanent to begin with.
The wearisome weather that I used to adore has withered us into just memories. It has snuck up behind me all too suddenly and all too soon. The leaves have crumbled and condensed into the same weak remnants that are left of you and me, and the snow feels like the cold shoulder I feel myself facing more than usual now. I see you in every season, every sunshine, every rain, every road, every place, and all the time. I see the new version of you a little too much in me now, who has begun to succumb to the bitter winters.
But there are still some fragments of the old me left that have not yet been rotted away. I still hold onto the girl who looks through eyes and still has hope when there is nothing to have hope in anymore. The girl who scours for even a fragment of truth in the words of someone who once made a vow never to leave. The girl who refuses to believe that you were not just a lesson to be learned. I wait with the naivety of the child I was for the winters to stop stinging like they do without you.
I wait for you to fill your empty, snowy footsteps.
I wait for you to come back.
