Oh, snow. Tell me your secret. Tell me how you learned to fall like that, slowly and intact, a s if the world itself had paused for you. We began in the same place, you and I, held together above all that is noticed, indistinguishable until the moment we were released. I remember that sameness still.
Somewhere on the way down, you were shaped into something the world could love. The air turned kinder in your favour, granting you the time I was never given. You learned how to hold yourself together, how to arrive whole. By the time you reached them, you were already beautiful, as if becoming had cost you nothing.
When you appear, faces lift without thought. Hands open instinctively, the way they do for things already trusted. You settle softly into hair and sleeves, into the quiet margins where attention lingers longest. You are permitted to remain. You are forgiven even when you slow the world, even when you make it harder to move through. Children surrender to you without fear, lying back and letting you take their shape. When I come, those same children are called inside. Voices sharpen. Doors close. Laughter thins to nothing. I learn, again and again, what it is to be the reason something beautiful ends. I watch them love you without effort, and I despise myself for wondering why it comes so easily to you.
I follow, and the air does not slow. I am pulled apart before I know what shape I am meant to keep. I fall because I must, not because I am welcomed. I arrive everywhere, touching too much, staying too long. I am necessary and unloved, felt only in excess, remembered only in complaint. You are missed. I am escaped
Still, I watch you rest upon the world, unafraid of being seen. I imagine myself lighter, quieter, cooled at the right moment. I imagine holding together long enough to be chosen. If I could learn your way of falling, I would. For somewhere in me lives the foolish belief that if I studied you closely enough, if I learned the exact manner of your descent, I might become you. That the difference between us was not decided at our beginning but granted mercifully along the way. That there was a moment, only one, when I might have been shaped differently, and was not.
If you possess a secret, snow, I am listening.
If you were given something I was denied, tell me its name.
I am so very tired of falling as I am.
Yours,
Rain