Sometimes, you like to pretend that you don't exist.

It's very simple to do so, in the dead of night with the snow smothering all the sounds. Unseen and unheard, it is very easy to pretend you are not. That is why you like the dark; it gives you a place to hide, where nothing can be seen and so nothing can exist. You can't exist. The darkness covers you and the snow you lay in, until you are indistinguishable from the snow. And if you hold your breath and lie perfectly still, you can trick yourself into believing that you are part of the snow, just another snowflake lying on the ground. You as a person are not.

Your powers over the cold and winter are dangerous. Your existence is a lonely one, and you are not particularly fond of yourself. Year after year, letting the wind fly you around the world, spreading cold and ice and snow and frost and death. Constantly moving, creating a storm or starting a snowball fight, or talking to someone who doesn't talk back. You can feel the energy in you, the energy that is so different from the dead cold winter that you spread, you can feel the energy tingling just beneath your skin, searching for a way out, constantly searching and you are tired.

You are a snowflake and you are cold and you are frost. You are nothing. In the dead of night with the snow smoothing all the sounds, you are nothing. No energy, no cold or heat or light or dark or life or death, you are nothing.

It is peaceful, being nothing.

Sometimes, you want to cry.

That is not to say that you are not happy. Generally, you are very happy, or at least too busy to be unhappy. It is just that occasionally, if you stop rushing ahead and chasing the cold, you'll find life will catch up to you. You'll find that maybe you weren't running towards winter but away from summer. And everything you didn't know you were running from, all the feelings and pain you didn't know you were hiding, come catching up to you.

You cannot cry. You've tried before, you've felt like crying before, but you've never been able to cry. You think maybe it is because you are winter, and cold, and any tears you might have simply freeze on your eyes, clouding your vision for a while.

You can feel the pressure, sometimes. The pressure builds up in your head, starting out behind your eyes and spreading, until it is pushing against the back of your head and the center of your chest and your stomach. And it builds, pressure mounting, until your head pounds and your chest hurts and you feel like you're going to be sick. The pressure builds to the point that you're sure that something must happen, something must give, because there is nowhere else for the pressure to go. You think, at that point, that you must be able to cry, to let out the pressure before you explode, or implode, or begin bleeding out of your ears and mouth and nose. You must cry, you must be able to cry, because no amount of screaming and no number of blizzards will lessen the tension built up inside your head.

But you can't cry.

And so you laugh instead.

(It doesn't help. The pressure's still there.)

Sometimes, you want to feel warm.

That's not to say that you ever feel cold, really, but it's different. You're used to cold, in the same way that children get used to cold after spending a couple of hours outside, so that they don't realize how cold they were until they go inside and take off their wet clothes and the heat starts making their fingers tingle and their skin flush.

You've never really felt cold, but you've never felt warm either. You have felt hot. In places where the sun chases your darkness away, throwing everything into sharp clarity and reminding you that you are, and that you always will be. You've felt hot in places where you've overstayed your welcome, and spring or summer burn away your frost, melt away your snow and leave you empty and exposed. The heat bites at your skin and stings and burns. You do not like being burned.

But you wish to be warm. There is a difference between hot and warm. Warm affects the insides, radiating out from the chest so that you can feel everything and everything feels safe and comfortable and home. You are cold, always cold, full of energy and excitement and action, but never calm, never warm.

Never home.

You have seen it in children, held close by their parents, warm and safe and loved. No worries in the world, nothing to thing about, content for a moment simply to be. The closest you have come to that is in the cold dark of night, when you hold your breath and are not. You wish to be warm, to be safe and loved, but a cold frost winter child is always moving, always doing, and as yourself you cannot be warm. Cold frost winter children cannot be warm and safe and loved; and so, sometimes, you like to pretend that you are not a cold frost winter child. You are not anybody. You are not warm or safe or loved, but you also are not full of constant energy, you do not always need to move, you do not always battle a constant pressure building in your head and chest and stomach and pushing against your eyes. You are calm. You are nothing. And that is peace.

So I started taking this new medicine while I'm on vacation, it's supposed to stop my anxiety, but it killed all of my plot bunnies. Then I got sick, so I might have been slightly delusional when writing this. Actually, I might still be slightly delusional right now. So I'm pretty sure this story makes no sense. See, you thought my other stories were disorganized and plotless, but you hadn't seen me write sick before. And it's in second person, because my narrative style gets approximately 612% weirder when I'm sick. I feel like I am going to regret posting this. I already kind of regret writing it. But that's a problem for future me to deal with. Oh well.