bluerain

It snowed in Tallaght.

Glorious it was on the first day. The intense whiteness of the pavements and lawns reminded me of Christmas winters, the ones I read in books as a child, and of snowmen and sleds, and of Christmas carols. The world was serene. I was blissful for a moment.

It went on for three more days and the chill and the damp became insufferable.

Then the Scotch mist came after the snow. It did not melt the snow, for it was a few degrees almost nil. And the snow mixed with the rain, became ice on the road – slippery, jagged, and cold. It started to snow again, but it melted quicker than it can touch the ground, for everywhere was drenched.

And children never came out to play anymore; snowmen left to melt.

My scrawny fingers too frozen to even turn on the immersion, and I lay in the bitter chill, grubby and befuddled. If anything, I had expected things to be different, to be joyful.

Maybe, it is too much to expect from a snow. It went away swiftly as it came; beautiful and faultless at first, but intolerable in the end. It could not even touch ground.

Ah, too foolish for me to seek things I know of to be impossible to possess. You cannot bottle such beauty. Like everything else, I must learn to let go and move on. The icy pain lingers, but not for long. There will always be another winter; the next time around, it will be whiter, and it will not hurt.

Besides, what is a snow then, but a frozen dew, that in as much as it came from heaven is neither saint nor an angel, but heartless, and cold.

Heartless and cold.

- bluerain