Crimsoned, and Decades Deep
"Magical!" I thought at the first sight of snow. It was in Tennessee, of all places, a blizzard and I was 7. I remember its warmth to my eyes. Sparkling from the sun; I had never actually seen snow, let alone touched it. My closest association was to cotton-floored Christmas displays during the west African dry season's blistering hot Decembers. The displays were populated with beautiful glass trinkets, like swans with bows, and the shops sold intricate, French pastries that drugged the air with sweet, ambrosial smells.
I had never seen trees so bare. The fall had been a sad season, the beautiful but slow death of all the leaves that had so flamboyantly painted the landscape. Then everything was barren, exposing neighbors I had never known were there.
So I stared fixated on the quiet perfection that blanketed everything. The way it rested in evenly thick coats on the top face of every single branch. I remember the way the road, once a black scar of asphalt on the landscape, had now disappeared. It was beyond fantasy, beyond anything I had ever conceived or dreamed. Something so pristine, so pure; I wondered if Heaven wasn't something like this.
Barely dressed, and without shoes; I forced open the door and rushed into that heaven. My soles burned. The air burned. My skin, my face, my eyes and into my lungs, the air burned! Like fire, except a darker inverse; a hostile, burning cold.
I had known ice as small cubes. I knew the mist from opened freezer doors. My most physically encompassing brush with the cold had been a breezy spring day at a Belgian train station. I had never known freezing, or felt it everywhere, so completely; my burning soles. Burning! And that sensation went to war with the beauty that my eyes begged me to touch.
I stood there, immobilized, struck and wounded. Heaven so suddenly tropical, eons away, and hell burned here, and now, and cold.
Today, I savor the harvest's bounty with a cautious eye; it is the first sign that Winter is coming. Winter, the love of my eyes, and the scar of my heart. I know that when we meet, I will always embrace her hypnotic majesty, and yet when close, her touch remains a stab, a surgical gash, crimsoned, and decades deep.
-L'Inconnu