Nocturnal

Part one/Chapter one: Leave Out The Quiet Ones

The air was always so cold. I'll probably never know if it was actually that way or if I just remembered it like that, but I liked it. When it rained I'd curl up by the window with my father's leather jacket and watch the rain pour down in the streets, pooling up on the sidewalks and running down the widow. Then one day something different happened, and little specks of white started falling down from the sky like flakes of ashes. Thats exactly what I thought it was too, since I had witnessed a fire only a few months before, and I remembered the way the ash floated down from the sky and onto the pavement at my feet. remembering this, I ran screaming into the kitchen where my mother sat, reading the newspaper and told her there was a fire. And of course she shot up and ran to the window only to start laughing as she let her forehead fall to rest on the glass after the sudden rush of adrenaline.

"It's snowing you silly boy!" she giggled as the turned her head to me and smiled.

I wasted no time in jolting to the door and running out into the cold silent air, standing in awe of what was officially the most beautiful thing I had ever witnessed in all of my five years of living. Before we had moved into the house up in Washington that my grandparents lived in I had spent many summers here but never the winters, and my old home was in southern California, where snow was apparently forbidden by nature. I still remember the feeling that it gave me, the still silence of the snow falling around me, sealing me into the innocent amazement of my youth. At that moment the snow drifting down onto our front lawn pulled me into its graceful rhythm and I fell in love with the frozen stillness of winter.

"Terrance, get back in here, it's 20 degrees out!" she said running outside to retrieve me out of the blistering cold, "god nothing phases you does it?" she muttered under her chilled breath.

I stood still with my face upwards towards the falling snowflakes, letting them dust my eyelashes and catch in my hair. A cold gust of wind rushed through the quiet streets, sending the snow into separate paths, drawing closer and closer to me, pushing the snow around like leaves in the fall. My mother took off her coat and wrapped it around me then lifted me up onto her shoulders,

"Your fascination never seises to amaze me," she said, tilting her head up to look at me, "you're just like your father."

This of course made me grin from ear to ear, as naturally a father is often like Superman to a young boy. He was my hero, always teaching me new things and pulling me back to my feet when I fell down. I watched the way that he handled every situation that came up, the way he could make my mother smile just by looking at her, even on her worst days. As I got older I came to wish that he'd taught me how to do that, and I wanted ever so badly to make her smile.

When I was seven my father died of a brain aneurysm that was caused from his smoking habits. My mother woke to find their pillows soaked in his blood and his clouded empty eyes staring into hers. She'd taken sleeping pills the night before to fall asleep, and she was convinced that had she been awake or even just in a lighter sleep, that she could've saved him. The doctors told her there was likely nothing she could've done, that the aneurysm had just gotten too big and that he bled out in a matter of seconds anyway. But she still held herself to blame for his death and started sleeping less and less as the months went by after his death.

At first I thought the grief would pass after at least half a year, but soon I knew that it would take much much longer. I tried to make her happy like my father could, or at least smile a bit to distract her from her depression. as the years went by I found that he was the reason she smiled, and that without him she fell to be nothing.