It Was The Cold

 I felt it like a thousand fingers everywhere. All of my body given away, outside, intruding inside – inside, within my throat, lungs, getting at my brain. The fingers stroked, tickled, caressed; they were persistent, slowly unravelling me. They left me bare, just a wild, pale, struggling shape. They scratched until they drew not blood, but memories. I had felt it all many times before, the feeling of not owning yourself. It was cruelly familiar: a reoccurring nightmare in both the sleeping and waking world. But never had it come so close to this, to the feeling of the fingers that had touched me first so long ago.

In the bleak midwinter…

I was drowning. Clear and sudden and so bleakly and empty of emotion it seemed almost, just almost, calm, I realised I was drowning. I had been walking, not hearing the Christmas carol sung merrily in the distance, the snow had been crunching, the forest had been a pallid fortress around me, and then the world had collapsed underneath me. There had been a splintering sound, of ice and composure shattering – then all the lights had gone out, and water filled my mouth and nose. I couldn’t breathe. I had been a figure rotund with layers of armor: thick winter coat, fur-lined boots, snow-gloves, thermal wear underneath everything, part of my skin. Now, I could feel my clothes, thick and weighted, clinging desperately to me; yet, I was naked to the thoughts and the memories and they were so, so damnably cold against my body, and my armor was just another thing attacking me.

Frosty winds made moan.

If I was so aware of my drowning, then why did I try to breathe? My chest pumping, my throat gulping, my mouth was wide open and begging, but it only gave a better opening for the fingers, which made up hands, to worm their way inside. I gurgled the water helplessly – foolishly - and let loose crazed, muted screams unheard by anyone but the unforgiving, undulating liquid about me. Lips mashed together, tongue and teeth; demented, my eyes were impossibly round one moment, drinking the darkness, and squeezed urgently shut the next as if praying for it all to disappear. When the water gave me no breath, I tried for the surface. I kicked and thrashed but couldn’t think to actually swim, and even when I got a lucky burst of logic and managed to surge upwards my head just hit the impenetrable ceiling of ice and knocked me completely senseless again.

Water like a stone.

Somewhere along there was the rupture, the collapsing of the world I fell through. If it wasn’t for the hands of frost tightening around my throat and chest - forcing all sense flee, leaving only wild instincts - I could’ve moved along, searching with my hands, found it and hauled myself up to safety. I could’ve just looked for where the bleached slash of light cut through the dark of the waters and swam towards it. I could’ve had a chance.

No sooner had I been struggling to breathe, the arms had succeeded in crushing my airway and instead, I was holding my breath. My body had recognized its drowning and began to carry out its process in attempt to sustain my life – but I knew, by now, that even if by some miracle someone or something saved me and I found myself amongst the air again, it would offer no liberties, no warmth. If the water was the weapon, then I could be sure that the cold was the entity wielding it fiercely. The knife could be taken from my chest, but it wouldn’t stop the bleeding. Nothing could.

The blood would just flow thicker and faster, a river of memories. The feeling of the fingers, hands, arms would remain until I was just dust and ashes. I would be frozen even when my corpse went up in flame.

I felt the hard kiss of the cold as it stole my consciousness. Just before, I felt the fingers, hands, arms reach my heart, take ownership of that too. I felt it begin to slow.

Each beat seemed to encompass a year. Time was stretched and warped, and now I knew clear and sudden and so bleakly and empty of emotion it seemed almost, just almost, calm, I realised I had passed just drowning, and now I was dying.

Then it was black, but it had been black before. It had been black with my eyes open and closed, but now it was black and I saw things.

When I was young, my father took me to swim lessons after I was left terrified one winter by a near-drowning scare at a local lake. My sleep was plagued by nightmares for weeks, but it wasn’t the water that scared me. It was the cold. I didn’t mind the swim lessons. The pools were warmed, and the water I could fight against – it was a sword that I could parry and block with my own blade - I understood that I could push down, down, down and be sent up, up, up. I told my father that: the water didn’t scare me; it was the cold. The cold paralyzed me, touched me in ways that made me shiver. I thought, with a strange certainty, I will die of this one day. My father thought I was just trying to being a theatrical child to get out of the lessons, and he kept sending me. I attended the lessons for years. Years. Passed so many stages, so many tests. I saw it all now: I remembered all the methods of swimming and protecting myself from the water. But in the end, it didn’t matter.

I was right. It was the cold.

The water may have been the thing that would fill my lungs and leave me blue and spasming, and then forever still, but it was the cold that would really kill me.

My lungs, by now, were just a lump of hopeless watery tissue in my chest. My brain was a cause lost long ago. There was a Christmas carol echoing ominously in the distance. I never did hear it.

But what can I give him?

The same fingers from so long ago closed around my heart; the hands tightened into fists; the arms jerked back erratically.

Give him my heart.

The cold’s newest victim fell still. It sank, just a blurred pale thing beneath the pale ice amongst the pale, unknowing world.

Never warm again.