The snow fell in heavy, disorienting sheets, but there was something wrong with it. The bright sun glared down, its warmth offering no comfort. It was a cruel thing, the way the light gleamed off the snow, making everything seem impossibly alive and dead at once. And that’s when it happened. I saw it—death—just standing there, just beyond the edge of the street, its shape too blurry to focus on, yet too real to ignore. I tried to tell myself it was just the cold biting into my bones, making me see things. But death doesn’t need an invitation. It never does.
I thought about life for a moment. The parable they always told us, the one where you find meaning in the struggle, the suffering, the redemption. It sounded like a cheap story told by some preacher under the dim glow of a church’s cracked stained glass. I wasn’t buying it. Not today. I couldn’t. There was only one thing left to do now, one way out: find the light. Not the sun above, but something deeper, something that could burn away the bitterness gnawing at my insides.
The cold bit harder, sinking through my jeans, my coat, into my bones. My knees were frozen, and yet, I couldn’t stop running. Running home. Home. The word felt foreign now, like something I’d long ago left behind and couldn’t recall how to find again. But I ran anyway, faster, harder, hoping the path would suddenly reappear underfoot.
And there was the familiar temptation, the call of it—the lure of another lover, someone to distract me from the dark places I kept trying to outrun. A fool’s bargain. I should’ve known better, but that didn’t stop me from chasing the same ghosts. No matter how many lies I spun, no matter how deep I buried them in the warm places of my heart, I knew the truth: we’re all so ******* lovable in our own way, even when we’re lying to ourselves.
I had wandered so far in the years since I first left. The roads had been endless, foreign, strange. Places that didn’t matter, but still, I had kept moving. I kept searching. For something. For meaning. For that thing I lost so long ago. Forever ago, like some strange dream I couldn’t wake from, a memory too distant to touch but still so real it burned my soul.
I’d never go back. But I kept running.
