Snowblind

Winters are always hard.

The brevity of day saps me like a blown out candle, and I forgot to make my wish. Is it because I was born a little lion under the sun? Is it too late to borrow a little flame? I can’t remember when it got so cold; only that one day beneath the bleakest black of February, I could not get warm. I was once a boy whose heart and bones had never felt a chill. Who loved this part of the year, where you could make shadows dance from the rainbow of a neon Christmas.

“What happened to that boy?” my mother asks–as she pretends she does not know.

You all dressed him in white, and I think I lost him somewhere along the way in the falling snow. I am trying to find him again, somewhere hiding in the dark on the longest night of my life with no wishes left and no flint to light.