The world felt different. An inexplicable shift, as though the ground you walked across was entirely different than the foundation of the Earth you'd known all your life. Perhaps, it felt like you were merely floating through the atmosphere, a lost particle of dust no longer having a rightful place amongst the sky. Like your feet, that timidly thundered against the pavement, left behind not a single step, not a single sliver of evidence that your presence had ever graced this Earth. The world felt different, in the way that the one you once knew, no longer existed.
The cold air soared through your lungs with a staggering sensation, one that nearly threatened to force you down to your knees, with the sheer strength in which it penetrated your chest. For the breath of winter was formidable, as it descended upon your shoulders, weighing you down towards the pavement that all but whispered your name. Your lungs, the mere core of your chest cavity, burned with a fire that once ignited, you feared could never be extinguished.
But the second your flesh touched upon the outside, inhaling your first breath of crisp and untainted air for the first time in nearly six months, it felt as if a current rippled its way through you. Seeping over the crackling embers, overwhelming the dancing flames and snubbing out the agonizing fire, with a simple coat of its icy presence.
For the cold was stronger than you had remembered it to be or perhaps, this cold was new and entirely formed for you. Perhaps, the frigid temperatures of the lingering winter season, that met you the moment those prison gates opened and set you free, were there to breathe life back into your very soul. A reminder, that the body that walked across the pavement in slow and rather disoriented steps, was alive and thrown back into the clutches of a reality that appeared more daunting than the very prospect of death itself.
The ice that extinguished the flames inside of yourself, punctured your flesh and burned along the trail of your inhales in a way that contrasted the heat of the once roaring fire.
For the cold that clung to you as if an anchor coiled around your extremities, without so much as a single hope that it might just fall back into the churning waves, took your breath away. It consumed you, taking over your will to think, as if it shredded through your flesh like the blades of a thousand knives. The wind that howled through the bare and brittle branches, whipped the vicious cold against your face as you passed through a set of doors you'd only passed through in the clutches of your dreams.
You always believed that if you were to see freedom, that the world left lingering would be a welcome sight. But you discovered, as your feet nearly stumbled against the pavement and your flesh was assaulted by the sheer velocity in which the cold found you, that the world was wholly unwelcoming.
As if the world you'd imagined in your memories all of that time, had simply succumbed to an extinction that wiped any semblance of its warmth, of its openness, of its peaceful place in your recollections. Leaving behind a world that you didn't recognize, one bathed in a cold that even the Devil himself wouldn't dare endure and a grey that had drained the very color of the Earth from view.
But perhaps, it was the way the world in which you'd returned to was supposed to appear. For you had glimpsed into a palace of pure peace, an eternity that was ready to welcome you with open arms and glistening golden gates, but you'd been snatched from the grasps of heaven and forced back down into a reality that could never compare. How was one to return just as contently to the cold cobblestone and harsh notions of the world, when they'd witnessed a place where death was peace and life was painless?
Perhaps, it was not that the world around you changed, but you yourself. For the noose around your neck, had been the very thing to open your eyes and see the world as it always had been.
Your breath froze as it met the open air, exhaling softly just to watch it fade into a cloud before your very eyes, as if it was smoke funneling from between your parted lips. It hung there, stalling in the brittle atmosphere like it hadn't a notion of what to do with itself after all this time. But just as your eyes, that had yet to blink through the cold, began to feel the pierce of windblown tears, it faded. Dissipating into the winter dusk as if your breath was merely another exhale of the season's presence, not one of a human being who still had a place in this world, but an insignificant sigh disappearing into the atmosphere never to be seen again.
