It was time.
The cold inside my heart had extinguished every ember of the fire of hope this world could give me.
When I opened the door of the cabin, the cold air kissed my face in a hurried welcome. I breathed in and out, forming a ghost cloud.
My eyes traced the white shroud-covered ground. Every inch of it was covered in a sheet of silver snow. I stepped out into the cold, into the welcoming unwelcome outdoors.
My feet immediately sank into the inch deep snow. I trudged along in it with heavy footsteps, the song of the snow against my feet echoing in the silence filled only by the icy breeze.
I made it to the middle of the snow-covered field. The middle, where the trees disappeared from view and there were no houses. The middle of the great deep unknown where you could really feel like you were alone. Just like I was in the middle of my life and I felt alone.
In this place, as far as the eyes could go there was white. White dissolved into more white and white, endless and infinite in it's own way. Alone, endless, infinite middle is the place I chose for my burial.
I bent down on my knees and felt the wet snow through my thin trousers. I place my bare hand in the snow, savouring the cold. My hand felt like it was touching this strange realm, this new sensation embraced it. The cold was like touching the spiky end of a needle; a foreign, unpleasant sensation.
But I didn't remove my hand like I would have done from a needle. I kept it there till the unfamiliar became familiar. Till I became a native of that foreign land. Till numbness embraced my hands in a tight life-long lover's kiss.
I placed my other hand next to it, balancing my body weight on them. I became a friend of this forbidden cold, feeling it take away my sense of touch and giving me the gift of being familiar in the unfamiliar.
I slowly slid onto my back. My back against the cold, the snow sank under my weight probably leaving my imprint in winter's visitor.
My thick jacket kept the cold from consuming me and I still had not yet gathered the courage to open the jacket. I brought my hands to my sides and lay in the snow, in rapt attention like a soldier.
My eyes and face were facing the stormy sky. The stormy sky overshadowed by dark clouds and no sunlight. The dark deep unknown consuming the familiar till the familiar becomes unfamiliar.
The snow, I pondered about it. It's white was sometimes intermingled with branches and dead leaves and sometimes it was clean and clear. This was one of those latter times.
White. The colour of purity. Divinity. Sainthood.
A snow shroud covering a lifeless body.
In hindsight it sounded beautiful. But I wondered whether the cold the snow brought with it was beautiful too. I had always wondered that.
When I was little and it snowed, we made snow Angels. I wanted to stay in that cold just to see what would happen. Now, I know what will happen and I am ready for it.
Right now, my face, hands and feet were piercing cold. They were numb but strangely enough they were also all I could feel. All I could feel was that comforting numbness. The rest of my body though not numb, had become numb by comparison.
Just like how we feel the pain longer than happiness. Just like how the melancholy stories are more beautiful than happy ones.
I unzipped my jacket and tossed it away. My t-shirt clad torso did little to block the cold. I felt like I was playing bare-chested in the snow. It took moments for the snow to chill me to the bone. My body protested against this strange new territory but I didn't budge. I remained still and persistent.
The pain came with the numbness. The tips of my fingers, my lips, my cheeks, my legs were frozen and hurting. It hurt like it would hurt to walk through a field of pine-needles barefoot. But slowly the pine-needles turned into metallic needles and then into thicker needles.
I breathed out through my mouth and left another ghost cloud above. I watched it dissolve right above me, as slowly the numbness took over my whole body.
Now, the numbness didn't feel like anything. Nothing felt like anything. I didn't feel. Just what I had wanted all my life.
I was losing my train of thought. I felt like I was flowing in this void where existence didn't exist. I was there and I wasn't, I wasn't me anymore and I was okay with it.
My thought dissolved into confusion and white-washed distant memories of a life lived, what now seemed like a century ago. I couldn't smile or cry, thinking of those memories for my face felt like it was frozen.
It was New Year's Eve. That much I remembered.
I remembered a song I had sung once.
Somehow in cold's death grip, I took control of my mouth and whispered in a broken tune, "Should old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind? Should acquaintances be forgot and Auld Lang Syne?".
I remembered faces, many, many faces. Acquaintances, family , friends, people who had loved me and known me. I had disappointed them, disappointed them by giving up in this long trail of life. I had not kept to pace with them on this journey and through the trials of time, our paths diverged so far that they never met again.
I could have reached out to them. They would have greeted me and told me to carry on. That things will get better and other lies people say just because they don't have anything better to say.
But I would rather be greeted by the cold with the promise that after this, nothing will feel bad anymore. That nothing will feel anymore.
"We too have paddled in the stream from morning sun till dawn,
But seas between us broad have roared.
Since Aund Lang Syne," I sang.
From morning Sun till dawn there were seas that paddled between us but I drifted off and found myself in a great unknown. Then, my paddles sank down into the unknown, and I sank into the unknown and then, the sea and the people didn't matter anymore. All that mattered was this unknown and how to make it known.
I never made it known. But I tried.
I tried and the snow will know it. The imprint of me in it whicht will fade when the snow melts, will know it. Like me, the snow too is momentary.
The momentary will remember the momentary so why go chasing infinites?
Why go running from this Oblivion which already has you by the heels? Why fear the great unknown when you know that you emerged from it and will one day, fade into it? Why fear at all?
Why fear when all of this is momentary and none of your mistakes will ever be remembered in something concrete? Even concrete isn't concrete after all.
"Since Aund Lang Syne," I repeated and repeated. I had forgotten the other words, my brain was disintegrating in the embrace of hypothermia. I was fading fast and I knew it.
But I sang with ghost breaths pouring out of my mouth. I sang with my heart pouring out of my mouth. I sang with the last chord of hope and life reverberating through my vocal chords and escaping with the white smoke that left my mouth.
Even though I was repeating the same line over and over again. This repetive loop still made those words afresh and new again and again. The comfort that they brought to me was anew everytime, a new wave of comfort washing over the ghost of a body I had left.
It was New Year's Eve.
I was freezing, cold and dying. I felt happy. I had done all I could and I was satisfied. My imprint left in snow, my imprint left in hearts of a handful of people. Finally, pain was ceasing to be something I had ever known. I was going yo know the great unknown or at least to become a part of it.
It was time.
A/N: My new Year present to u all
