Winter's Allegory

The full moon spins silver jewels through velvet, drooping branches. Magical, intricate webs full of stories old and new loosely hang, each memory woven through prisms. The melting dew drips onto the barren, empty earth. The moon’s exhale mixes together with snowflakes to create crystallized pathways, licking the side of tree trunks then scattering like rapid flames.

A girl has just come to a fork in the trail. Her hair is dyed marigold and stands out starkly against the white forest. Her face is as pale as the snow, and her lips tinted purple. Each pathway she sees leads deeper into the woods. She is alone, struggling to part through the darkness of her mind. Her heart is like a dying light, an owl’s nest hidden from the world, pulsating every now and then, like a lighthouse to sea. Esme’s footsteps align with each beam of light from the night sky. She walks on, choosing the right side of the trail, admiring how the moonlight holds nothing back, like an elegant whisper. The snowfall echoes her aching urgency to get to her destination. Fluffy flakes line her onyx eyelashes and kiss her porcelain hands deep plum. 

The glint of the night sky is even more faint and closed off now, the tree branches enveloping the only source of light. The girl fights the darkness as she descends further and further into the forest. Esme screams out, wishing for control as she feels her legs start to go numb. Ice seethes her throat and closes off her oxygen.

She does not stop. The disappearance of stars above her reminds her of the feeling of drowning, a desperate shoot up for air. She doesn’t call the shakiness of her hands and crunch of boots on snow courage, although it is. Suddenly in the darkness, she stumbles upon a fogged mirror. At the corners are fragments of ice that creep down the sides of the eerie reflection, a hushed crescendo. Esme sits on the forest floor. Powdered snow whisks softly down from where it was caught in the spruce branches, soaking her hair and rosy cheeks.

With a deep breath, Esme peers into the mirror. She is startled to see two faces, her own face at this moment and her younger self. The ice explodes from the sides of the mirror to create a perfect split down the middle, separating the two faces. Two sides of a coin. The reflection is as imperceptive as solid liquid, wavering and bending. Esme feels her chest tighten and constrict as she looks at her younger self. The little girl has sunken amber eyes and slicked back brown hair. The child stares back at her unblinking, lost and ashamed.

She lifts a frozen, violet hand and presses it against the frosted crackles of the mirror. Her neck spasms and her stomach jumps as pain spreads across her body. Esme feels herself go into shock as her body quickly changes from freezing to burning hot, her adrenaline burning like a forest fire. Images cascade from childhood to adulthood, melting like quicksand and mingling into one another. The girl sobs as an avalanche of trauma stampedes through her body. She forgets where and who she is, what’s real and what’s not. She rests her head against the mirror in exhaustion. The flashback grips her threateningly.

She is a very small girl, maybe 3 years old. She lays in a kitchen sink naked with her father’s hands above her, like a puppeteer. She giggles but feels like she should scream. She is 5 years old and positioned by her father to sit pants down on the toilet edge. That doesn’t work, so the bathtub’s edge. She wonders why rash cream hurts. She is 8 years old and rolling underneath blue blankets, not knowing any better because it's her Papa. The sound of her childhood laughter pierces her brain in anger and disgust. She is 14 and she is running away. 18 and here.

Esme stands up, her knees threatening to buckle. She gazes far ahead through the snowfall, finding where each moment begins and ends, breathing slowly. She traces the mirror again, afraid but braver than she will ever admit aloud. She has spent so long convincing herself that presenting herself as weak and mild will hide her true soft spots in her armor. If someone knew she had armor and could be strong, wouldn’t they search her shields, diving their fingers into every crack? Yet in this cold, snowy forest she feels warmth spreading from her chest to her fingertips as she allows all of herself to exist at once. Esme closes her eyes and screams. Her will to be free breaks the cage around her chest, skewing glass to the ground. The mirror image collides. Her younger and adult self smears into one another, and she feels forgiveness and grace in her heart. Esme lets go of the power that once trapped her in a nightmare, to give all of herself a chance for the first time. She tells herself she loves herself as the little girl in all of the flashbacks for the first time in six years.

"I love all of me," she whispers. "Even the dark, scary parts that had to learn how to survive."

Picking up a piece of broken glass for a keepsake, Esme treks on out of the dark forest to where the moonlight floods and dances across the banks. She notices at the end of her travels that the left and right trail intersected, the same destination. Although her lips are dry and sore, she smiles at this. Esme takes a sudden leap back as a young fawn erupts from the left side of the trail to race down near the icy creek. Her eyes are wide and tumultuous, she is afraid, but every step she bounds is still certain. Her younger self is truly free in the shape of this doe. She watches the fawn leap into the shadows, brilliant and adventurous. 

***

Esme went home to her mother that night and found solace in her arms. They cried and shared their grief of the trauma together. She still has a flashback to the abuse from time to time, but now she can think of herself as that free deer bounding into the moonlight, unchained.