Melting Snow

The last time we did this, things didn’t end so well.

Afterwards, we had been so scared—I had been so scared—of trying again. But here we are, aren’t we? Back on this white-capped mountain with the white-capped trees, melting into each other like sun-warmed snowmen. It’s been at least four years since I dared to come back here, and you’ve taken just as long to look me in the eyes again.

But I know you must remember it. You had stood there smiling like a little schoolgirl, hair matted by snow and sweat, curls of coffee brown peeking from underneath a woolen cap. Your dark, round eyes peered into my heart, and your laugh rang like Christmas bells, breaking down my winter walls. You were a blushing sun greeting her darling sky with a new year’s kiss.

“It’s okay,” you tell me now, your fingers tugging at my sleeve. “It’s okay. Everything that happened, I mean. It’s not your fault.”

I try to blink back tears, try to tell you how sorry I am that I left you, how horrible it must be to live with a tenuous heart, I should know. But nothing comes out. And then you kiss me like the wind, soft and cool, and my undeserving lips tremble at your touch. You cup my cheek with your small porcelain hand, just like you did so many years ago, and you motion me to the sled.

I love you. I miss you.

But I can’t say it without crying, so I decide not to say it at all. You just look at me and nod, as if you understand. I nod back because I know you do.

I climb into the rickety sled and grip the sides with my gloved hands. I am careful to not touch you more than I can help because I’m afraid you’ll wince at the contact and disappear from my life. I’m afraid of rejection and regret and the reality of needing you. So I will my body to stop yearning for yours, pray for my hot breath to subdue and for my tense muscles to relax. I close my eyes in concentration, but then I feel you again. You’re always too close for my own good.

“Let’s go,” you whisper, and I can almost see your voice breaking. Then you tilt your head forward, and our bodies jerk. Suddenly, we are tumbling down the hill, a mirror image of what happened four years ago—a distorted mirror image, anyways, because life never repeats in exactitudes.

The wind slaps against my face, and my heart bangs against my chest, and I am overtaken by the emotion of it all. My blood is pumping with adrenaline and serotonin, maybe some of the anti-depressant I took last night. I inhale. I exhale. The snow glistens all around me, and for the first time in four years, I allow a smile to spread across my lips. It feels strange and splendid, like a secret I stole and kept safe. And for the first time in a long time, I feel alive.

I warm at the thought, and the heat spreads through my body, pressing on my sides and blowing open my lungs. Every inch of my human flesh melts under its touch, and I almost forget how cold your hands were.

But then the sled skids to a stop. A mound of ice forges in front of me, and my smile evaporates. My vision blurs. I want to collapse. But then you kiss me, and I kiss back, and I can’t seem to find your lips, and I open my eyes to a landscape of melting snow.

“Hey,” I whisper to no one. “It’s me.” And suddenly, a tear slides down my cheek, and then I am crying, and I am wailing, and instead of your kiss on my lips, I feel the salty stain of my own sorrow.

According to the neighbors, it had been no one’s fault.

“Poor guy,” they had told the local news, “It was a horrible accident.”

Mr. S even visited my house afterwards and brewed me a cup. He had mentioned how coffee was the best medicine for “feeling down,” but I didn’t care because he didn’t understand. I wasn’t feeling down but rather empty and endless. Hollow. Hopeless. I hadn’t been feeling down; I had been feeling dead. I had been feeling dead even though you were the one who actually was.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” Mr. S had insisted—but when only one person survives, only one person is to blame.

“That’s not true,” you would remind me at night, your ghostly presence ever haunting.

“Fine,” I would retort, mournful anger stinging my eyes. “Then let me rephrase it: the one who remembers is the one who hurts.”

You could never find a comeback for that one because it was true. Life isn’t the bitch. Memory is.

Memory and my inability to escape her are the reasons why I’m sitting here now, mind reeling, body pulsing to the rhythm of unresolved heartbreak. If only I could forget, if only I could forget, if only I could reconstruct a perfect past and reconcile the pain. I rock back and forth, head cradled in between my knees, the image of your bloodied head wheeling in my mind, your hitched breaths, my numb fingers and lack of response. I had been too flustered, had called the ambulance too late—and by then, you had been gone. Forget it, forget it.

You lift my head with your icy fingers and point me towards the mountain.

“Forget?” you ask, a tender smile playing on your lips. “You didn’t come here to forget.”

I bite back a tear and my stomach flutters. And then you say the words that I most don’t want to hear.

At the sound of your nonexistent voice, my heart pounds and screams and collapses into itself. My fingers rake the snowy ground like a madman, my fat tears freezing before they can drop. I am both burning and melting, numbing and coagulating, a tremor in the winter night longing to be saved. And you are the roar in my head, a distant memory of warmth and desperation and mistake and mourning.

A distant memory. A dormant seed in the winter, blooming after death, reminding me what it means to live.

I sit up, lifting my head to the star-speckled sky.

“You’re right,” I say, repeating the words you had said, the words I didn’t want to hear.

“I came here to remember.”