Winter begins not with snow,
but with the silence before it—
that strange pause
when even the wind forgets its name,
and the sky holds its breath
like it’s waiting to see who you’ll become
when everything else is stripped away.

I step into the cold,
and it feels like stepping out of memory.
No past.
Just breath and bone,
cracking in the stillness.

Nothing lies in winter—
it simply covers.
A kind of mercy, maybe.
A kind of dare.

Under the frost,
things don’t disappear.
They hold their shape
quietly,
aching to be misunderstood.
Just like me.

This season doesn’t decorate.
It reveals.
The trees forget how to pretend.
The ground stops performing softness.
Even the light arrives with sharp edges.
I see myself more clearly
when everything else withdraws.

I have mistaken warmth for truth.
For love.
For permanence.
But there is a clarity in cold
that no fire has ever given me.

Some days I feel like a lake beneath ice—
still, but only on the surface.
Underneath: movement.
Old things.
Unspoken.
Refusing to freeze all the way through.

I carry myself through these white hours
without language,
only instinct.
Only the weight of breath in my chest,
reminding me
that survival is not the same as stillness.

And if identity lives anywhere—
it lives here.
In the bones of trees.
In the hush after snowfall.
In the refusal to bloom
just because someone else is tired of waiting.

I do not need to thaw
to be real.