White.
It stretches to the horizon, all white snow and white sky.
(The sky looks so impenetrable, I wonder if I am in purgatory.)
The silhouettes of bare trees waver in and out of reality like glitches in a flatscreen. Which is true reality and which is unreality? It is difficult to discern. Perhaps they are all neither.
I kneel down to pick up a handful of snow.
Somehow, it is not cold.
The snow slips through my fingers like sand (like time).
(If it does not feel like snow nor behave like snow, is it really snow?)
I remember I should be running. The need to escape—the need to be Away—feels overwhelming, invades my blood and heart and lungs.
I can hear my pounding heartbeat (but not much else).
My feet scramble to run (away, away, away-). The snow traps my feet as though it were quicksand.
Maybe this isn't the aftermath of some blizzard after all. Maybe it is some strange amalgamation of desert and limbo. But then, they say the Antarctic is a desert, do they not?
There is a catharsis in inevitability, in knowing I will be swept away by roiling storms. Maybe this is why so many believe in Fate.
And yet I still feel the need to be Away.
(Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, never truly leaves.)
I yank my foot out of the ravenous snow.
(C'est la vie.)
The night is still young.
