Home. March Break. Winter has swallowed everything. There are no lines left to follow—no sidewalks, no fences, not even memory. Just a vast, unbroken skin of white that muffles all sound and softens the shape of the world. Homes look like sleeping animals under the weight. Doors have disappeared. Paths have vanished. And still the snow falls, steady as breath. It presses down on time. No one speaks of the birds anymore. They will come, yes, someday—returning like forgotten songs—but not now.
Now is for the cold silence, for the ache in your hands, for the stubborn ritual of digging. The shovel is your compass. Each lift, each thrust into the frozen mass, a kind of prayer. You carve a way not just forward, but inward—toward resilience, toward the thing that holds you upright even as your eyelashes freeze. The snow keeps secrets, buries old sorrows, preserves the bones of summer’s laughter somewhere far below. The wind, relentless, sings through cracks in the eaves. You move anyway. There is no choice. There is only the rhythm of survival—shovel, breath, shovel, breath—until the shape of the door emerges again from the blankness.
