Winter's Lullaby

Chapter two: It All Began With Snow

It all began when the snow had fallen down from the icy blue sky and landed on the ground.

That's when everything changed.

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I woke up that morning to find everything in my room blanketed in a soft, white snow. Small heaps and slopes of snow fell perfectly over my chair and floor, my desk and my closed laptop. Specks of it decorated my green comforter draped across my bed and collected in the corners of my room in tiny clusters. When I exhaled, my breath frosted in the air. A misty white cloud in the loose shape of a heart trailed out of my mouth before it slowly curled over in on itself and dissipated into nothing.

I sat up, pushing the damp comforter off of me as my thoughts flew to Madison.

A flash of memory burst through my brain; her radiant smile and gleaming grey-green eyes as she pulls on my hand, the weight of her fingers wrapped around my palm as familiar to me as my own heartbeat. Her chestnut brown hair flying in the breeze and her lyrical laughter floating around me as she raced me to her house. Towering trees, autumn leaves carpeting the forest floor, and a bright blue cloudless sky all tumbling around us in the back round.

The memory strikes like a bullet, fast and sharp. I have to close my eyes and steady my breathing before I push it away, back into the darkest recesses of my mind where I won't be able to encounter it anytime soon. Back, back, back until I force myself to forget what memory just hit me.

A sudden gentle wind passed through my open window and a few dancing snowflakes accompanied it, gracefully twisting and gliding through the air until coming to a soft stop on the floor, like tiny birds taking to land to rest.

So that was the source, I had fallen asleep with my window open again, just in time for the first snow to. I pulled back the covers as the stirring of the new, frigid wind passed over the contours of my room, shuffling and whispering paper with essays and homework on them, leafing briefly through the pages of my book of poems, the circulating air stealing the scent of freshly scrawled sharpie and ink from it's pages, mixing it with the light fragrance of the snow.

I bring my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my legs, watching as another gust sweeps in through the open window and brings with it a small flurry of dancing snowflakes. I watch as they settle and fall, some floating towards me to land on my knees or in the trendils of my brown hair.

I can't seem to make myself move. To shut the window that lets in the arctic cold, to move to someplace warm, get the blood flowing back in my frozen limbs.

I don't care that I am freezing, or that my body is slowly going numb.

After all, my best friend died a week ago.

It happened on a cool December morning.

I was looking outside the window in Geography class, staring out at the world covered in glistening snow. Frost had started to make itself known in the corners of the glass of the window in delicate, floral patterns that would break if you so much as breathed on them.

I was looking at these, tuning out Mr. Hedge's lecture about South Africa's economy when a policeman entered the room. I didn't notice at first, staring at the finely crafted pieces of thinner than paper ice patterns on the glass, wondering if maybe in their swirls I could find a hidden message from another world.

 "Miss Winters," Mr. Hedge called, his voice filled with melancholy.

I turned my head,

and it was like- 

There was a raining thundercloud over the two men standing at the foot of the classroom. There was nothing but stiff sadness and foreboding in the unmatching color of their eyes. I felt the weight of every pair of eyes in this small four-walled confined room on me like anchors.