Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
A/N - I highly recommend that you press play on the song above and let it run throughout this chapter! ;)
It was finally snowing in Yokohama!
Snow danced in the beautiful morning light, a choreographed ballet conducted by the gentle wind. As you watched; your eyes grew just that tiny bit wider; as open as they were when you were a little girl, beaming brightly when you saw the street had become a fresh new page awaiting your playful feet and mittened hands.
They say we live in the moment, that the past is always gone, and each day is something new, a stepping stone into a future we dream of even in the cold. For you, that was snow, that was those wintry days of bluster and ice. You saw the earth of yesterday covered as white as any new page and the toddler in you arose as if armed with a rainbow of crayons, eager to set that right. Yet today, you were happy to simply walk in it, create a few footprints of your own in this Yokohama snow. You watched them tumble, those feathered crystals, their chaotic fight to form a blanket that could not be more uniform, more orderly. Yet for some, their destination was to come to your hand, to alight upon those ungloved fingers and let your warmth be their spring melt.
The newly clothed trees rose as white fairytale beings in that wintry landscape—for the grey clouds had bequeathed a bounty of snow. When you realised you had reached the stone staircase, you looked ahead, and were momentarily enraptured by the beautiful sight of the bountiful sea.
The sea that graced Yokohama—the sea that painted the landscape—was infinite blue in infinite weather patterns, yet in all this the sea was the prettiest colour that you had ever seen. You couldn't believe that such a place had actually existed, and you were surprised that you had never come across it before in your entire time of living and working here in Yokohama.
"I never knew Yokohama had a place like this," you spoke softly to yourself; completely and utterly in awe as you walked down the stairs. You couldn't get distracted from why you were really here, though.
To enter the cemetery, you had to skirt around a pile of brown frosted leaves, the innumerable flashing fragments shone in the brilliant wintry light; covered in a blanket of pure white. Even the leaf stems scattered across the ground were white and sharp. Ahead, the path glistened like white quartz, yet ice crystals on weary concrete was all it was. All this beauty over everything dead. And here you were to add to it with a bunch of pink roses in your ungloved hand. You paused, your breath rising in invisible puffs, and then you remembered exactly why you even came here in the first place—though you suddenly felt nervous, and you weren't too sure if you were shivering because of the light anxiety coursing through your veins, or if it was because of the weather—the weather that had caused subzero temperatures to hit the city of Yokohama today.
