White blue White

If I had told you I had loved you, would it have changed anything?

A snowstorm blew through our suburban frontier and froze everything, white, blue white; like your smile. Everyone always thinks of bare tree limbs, somber fragile and rattling. I remember the drifts that piled up against my back door and the frozen path that slid down my driveway, to my mailbox, to my lamppost, to the place I would stand and breathe and breathe nothing but smoke.

Winter is the only time I feel alive.

It’s the only time of year I can tell I’m breathing.

I remember the drifts by my back door because that’s where you used to come in.

I don’t remember where I found you, or why we suddenly threw ourselves together hanging on by the edges of our fingers, but I do remember watching you standing, breathing in breathing out. Your breath was a shade darker than the air. It hung like a halo, a wraith, or a soul. I liked to think it was what spring might have looked like.

There was something about that winter that made me appreciate sunlight in a way I never had before. Days would grow shorter and darker with each passing week and I remember waking up at dawn just to catch the light each morning. I had jars on my windowsill to catch it all, my mother’s Tupperware, my grandfather’s glasses, and my brother’s fish tank.

You poked holes in the lids so it could all breathe.

That winter I never took so many black and white photographs, just to have it, just to remember that sunlight could make things so beautiful. I had them taped to the edges of my windows, above my door, and from the lamps in my room. I had one on my bedpost, just above the place you slept.

You weren’t in any of them, I had tried once but I only ever saw you when it was dark, a wisp of fog told me you were always breathing, breathing right along with me. When the power died and we had nothing but us and the little light through the window I remember our breath drifting up and out and away. I knew your profile better than I knew your face, and I never knew the colour of your eyes.

I remember those drifts by my back door, and how it was dark by 5:30.

If I had told you I loved you… would you have used that snow shovel by my shed to dig me out again?

I did have one picture of you. The sky was grey, it was underexposed and dark, but your profile is there, a halo of hair around your head and that wisp of breath hanging like a cloud in front of my window. Your mouth was open. I don’t remember what you had been saying.

I wish I could.

I never told you that I left my backdoor unlocked for you.

When the first heat wave hit I took all those photos and put them in those jars by my window, filled all my mother’s Tupperware, and lined my brother’s fish tank. I took them all in my arms, in an old wagon, and in my hood and left them on your front door step.

I kept yours on my bedpost.

I always tell anyone who asks your eyes were white blue white and when you breathed I pretended it was spring.




That place on your pillow

clover grows there now.