Winter

Vienna sat on the creaking swing set, waiting for him and tracing her cold fingers numbly on the rust that smelled like blood. As she looked around, the sunset-colored leaves that fell on the pavement were the only glimpse of color on this bleak, lifeless autumn afternoon. Winter was creeping into the year, once more, like an unwanted guest. 

She feared winter the way little kids feared the dark. It was a pulsing, throbbing remainder of the way time passed mercilessly and waited for no one. She realized time felt like a race, she had to force her legs to move faster and faster to keep up with it and often found herself wanting. 

The inhumane cold of the season also resembled death. 

Every time there were more empty chairs at Christmas dinners. Her grandmother, perhaps the only person who got her at all, was no longer there. Her parents barely spoke to each other. And her sister hadn’t made it home the past year, busy with kids of her own and her husband's family. Would Vienna even want Sophia there? Distance wasn’t the only thing that separated them now, and each time she saw her sister, her foreignness filled her with uncertainty. 

At seventeen, Vienna knew she should be reeking with life. She saw her friends, so eager to live in the moment, so desperate to relish the delicate innocence of youth. “We will never be this young and beautiful again.” Olivia, her lifelong best friend, always repeated. But Vienna didn’t feel like a teenage girl at all, she felt like a soul stuck in an unknown body. She was always wishing for more and neglecting what she had—longing for the future with excited dread and clinging maniacally to the past. Everything at once. 

With every minute that passed, she felt so much closer to her last breath. At this age one should believe they were infinite, however, she knew better. How could she feel so old when she had lived so little? 

Olivia, who had grown beside her, felt the same way about the passing of time, except she did it flawlessly. She was the sun, warm as a summer night and intense as fire, grabbing her own life with both hands and becoming the center of it. No one was better at being seventeen than her, so earnestly eager to make mistakes and learn from them. Olivia knew that every phase of your life existed to be lived accordingly, so she didn’t rush to be older or younger than she was. For her, every spring was a blank canvas and she was the bright colored paint. For Vienna, on the other hand, winter was a death sentence, a ticking clock. 

She looked around, the sky was slightly turning into a darker shade of blue. Where was he? She smelled the moist scent of the earth and the moss of the trees. As she stared up at the leaves, she began to think about her own life. It felt like nature was a reflection of humanity. The roots were her parents before her, and their parents before them, and their parents before them. Every single person who had crafted her being through inheritance; all the stories she had never heard, but made her who she was. Then the trunk of the tree was herself, her past and childhood, and everything that had brought her to this abandoned swing set on this chilling November night. The branches were all the potential she had been told she held within herself. Yet the leaves were brown and orange and scarce, gasping for life. 

Finally, she saw his silhouette walking towards her. The sky had now turned the color of the leaves, hints of orange bleeding into violet and a dark, deep blue. 

A chill went through her bones as he approached her. 

“How are you, Vienna?” He stood above her, keeping his distance. 

“Good.” Her voice was small. 

“How was your fall?” 

“Could you cut the formalities, please?” Her voice wasn’t demanding, it was only pleading.  

“Sorry. You’re right. What did you want to ask me?”

She gathered the strength she had left “I wanted to ask for one more night.” 

“Vienna, not this again.”

“Why not? Only one, okay? I know I don’t deserve it. But give me another chance, please. I’ll be better.” 

For her despair, his sight was so gentle. “You know I can’t do that.”

“Just one.” She was crying now, or maybe she had been crying all along. “Just give me more time, I’ll be better.” 

He looked at her with his deep gray eyes and she recalled their first meeting. It was a fresh, colorful April afternoon in this same park and the air was perfumed with the fragrance of daffodils. Vienna was walking with her girlfriends when she saw him staring at her from afar. A slight chill went through her skin at the sight of him. She had seen this unknown, alien, eerie-looking boy looming quietly in her life for weeks and decided to call him out. She was braver back then.  

Anger and a hint of fear rose on her chest as she approached him. 

“What’s the matter with you? Are you following me?” her voice was demanding, gleaming with authority. 

But his eyes were kind, almost sad. He had a tragic, timeless air in his stance and his features. Something magical and terrifying fluttered in Vienna when she saw that strange, otherworldly face.  “I wanted to talk to you, Vienna, but I didn’t know how.”

Usually, she would have told him to leave her alone and gone the other way, but she knew better, somehow. 

They sat on the swingset as he explained everything. 

Weirdly enough, Vienna fell into a masochist, autodestructive infatuation with him and everything he represented. Afterward, they met with the changing of the season in this exact spot. She began to live in black and white, weary and restless for the next time they’d meet. This was the most illicit of the affairs, yet she imagined this was what love must’ve felt like.  

She looked at him once more, he belonged to another time. “Please.” 

“I wish I could change things, believe me,” he sat next to her on the swing and held her hand. “But I can’t.” 

“Could you at least give me the reason?” desperation was rising in her voice.

“I don’t know. All I know is that I will be back, before the end of the winter, and it will be the last time.” He squeezed her hand. “I wish I could change your fate. There is nothing fair about dying at seventeen.” 

She stared at his face, the face of death. Last spring, he had told her that she had only months left. “Before the first flower blooms, you’ll be gone. I’ll have to take you with me.” 

Vienna knew he was an angel of some sort since the moment she laid eyes on him. She knew that this rare boy that only she could see, who appeared in her dreams, spoke in an ancient manner, and had been looking over her in the shadows for the past year would lead her to her final destiny. She knew she’d never feel the summer heat on her skin again the same way she knew the sun would come out the next morning.  

Since that day, her life had been black and white. She had been obsessed with death and with him. She believed that he held only a promise, and promises could be broken. So she locked herself in a home, desperately trying to evade her unavoidable fate. She didn’t go out, didn’t smile, didn’t even laugh. Unknowingly, she had been a phantom of her design. A gray, somber ghost, dead in life. What a wasted year, she thought sorrowfully as she stared at the now black sky, what a wasted life.