It snowed. Snow drifted onto the ground, gently occupying a small patch of territory, and in time claimed everything on the surface: houses, roads, trees. Snow is like shredded paper, words discarded, scattering, losing their shape. I step on the snow. The snow cries out, pressing against itself, leaving a trace that I was here, along with the dirt I carry. This is an order I issue to the snow: it must keep the ground exposed, visible, held in the state of being watched by me.
I step into the snow. This is how I command it. I can adjust its shape, its state, its position at will. I also sense its resistance: the snow collapsing and melting beneath my feet. In their collective state, they even try to engulf or carry me. I look up, and they rush toward me like moths to a flame. They are challenging me. They launch a swift assault on my ordinary state. They obscure my vision, obstruct my path, they hijack my attention. The snow gives me an illusion: here, you can have a record that belongs to you. A unique pattern in the snow. A personal file. Then, without notice, they level it or dissolve it. Snow is snow. Don’t think you can alter the snow’s sense of self. Perhaps the snow does possess a more solid sense of self than I do.
Snow melts into a puddle on the road. I can’t help wanting to mock its vanity and its fragile, brittle whiteness. It is crushed, soundlessly, helplessly, by everything. Even the slightest touch sends it scattering. But mocking it this way feels wrong. Snow melts into a puddle that does not flow, unlike the water in rivers. Snow does not leave. Snow refuses, no matter what, to flee the place it can no longer bear. It does not leave, nor does it take anything with it. Sometimes the snow relinquishes the white it was so proud of, that moving, mournful white, and embraces other snow, twisting, caving in, forming a grayish-black irregular sculpture you can hardly bring yourself to call snow. Sometimes I think about how it really does persist in the world in this posture, this form, like an unfinished tombstone. But it will remain. It will curl tightly into a lump, shedding the occasional tear, and hold that patch of ground. The tears don’t escape either.
And so the sky has become a snow sky. Look up, and even that sun, the one that aggressively forces hope upon me, has been stained dim. You say, how do you get through a sky like this? The world has changed, the world has changed! In truth, the world already changed the moment the clock was set forward a whole hour; has it really held out this long before snowing? The snow sky is here again. The snow is dancing in the air again. Hurry and stuff everything you want to say, everything you want to do, and your mood that swings between gloom and hot flashes into the snow. While the snow is still falling, hurry and roll up all of it, the exasperating, the lonely, the bitter, the prolonged, the bland, the sensitive, the vigilant, the vicious, the feeble, the things beaten by waves and meteors, shackled by layer upon layer of fog, that which has never been changed and that which has already gone forever, all of that time, roll it all into snowballs and hurl them at the streetlights! The snow is still falling, the snow casts its spells from somewhere unseen, the snow has covered everything! There is nothing left! Never again! The snow has covered everything!
I drag my frozen legs across the snow.
The snow has covered everything.