It’s a quiet thing, a word found in the stillness of dawn while dreamers slumber and the new moon succumbs to day. A fading thought, soft intake of breath in the long pause
between sleep and wake. Sometimes it’s hope enduring wildfire, flood, or the dusts of time. Maybe dinosaur bones, a lost tomb, or scarecrows guarding lavender fields.
Perhaps a dew-drizzled cobweb, a jonquil, cloud or song. Most often it’s your breath, soft and steady, promising one more day in which I will belong.
We climbed past where the trees give up, boots sinking through hush and drift, wind at our backs like a warning we chose not to hear. The red shack waited— tilted, rust-kissed, half-swallowed by snow.
Inside, a match struck light against the cold. One flame, then another, until the dark softened just enough to hold us.
There was one chair. Two blankets. The kind of quiet that lets you hear your own name in someone else’s breathing.
We didn’t talk about what waited below. Not your return flight, not the half-packed bag, not the years of almost. You laughed at the frost collecting in your lashes. I didn’t say how long I’d been watching that storm coming.
Your knee brushed mine beneath the blanket. You didn’t move. Neither did I. The silence turned warm around us.
Outside, snow piled up against the door— a kind of mercy. Inside, your hand rested near enough that I could’ve reached it without asking.
And didn’t.
You slept. Or pretended to. And I watched the window turn from black to the soft grey of not yet morning.
Later, we climbed down without speaking of it. The wind had died, but something else was already drifting.
Now, sometimes, when I smell woodsmoke or hear the hush of snow against tin, I think of that night.
Not with regret. Not exactly. Just the ache of something so nearly true, it still breathes somewhere in the white.
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II. What the Snow Didn’t Cover
(Her Voice — Then and Now)
We climbed higher than we should have, past the line where trees stop pretending to survive. You didn’t complain once— just kept pace, like you’d follow me anywhere. Maybe that was part of the problem.
The red shack was smaller than I remembered from the map. Leaned east, like it had been bracing against wind for decades.
Inside, your hands shook lighting the match. Not from cold. I said nothing. You handed me the flame like a question.
There was one chair. Two blankets. No space for lies.
I pulled the blanket over both of us. You didn’t move away. The silence felt like something we’d been circling for years.
We didn’t speak of the train waiting in the valley, or the person I said I’d marry. Not of the night you left my flat before I woke, not of the letter I never wrote.
Your shoulder touched mine. Just that. But it lingered.
I didn’t sleep. Faked it because I couldn’t bear the weight of your eyes on my back, not if they were saying what I think they were.
In the morning, you brewed coffee so quietly it hurt.
I thanked you. Too softly, but you heard.
And we walked down like the snow hadn’t buried something between us.
Even now, when winter presses its fingers against my windows, I go quiet. I remember the warmth we almost let happen, the way you never reached for me— and how I never asked you to.
And I wonder if love is just the sum of all the silences we never dared to break.
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III. All That the Snow Kept
(His Voice — Years Later)
You never looked back— not once— as we left the shack behind. But I remember how your hand brushed mine that night, how you didn’t pull away.
And how I didn’t take it.
We both left something in that red-walled hush. Not a kiss, not a promise— just the warmth that might have followed.
You were always better at staying silent. I was always better at pretending not to notice what silence could mean.
There was a moment— when you shifted in the dark and the blanket slipped just enough— I saw the skin of your back, pale in the lantern glow, and I thought if I speak now, if I say it— but I didn’t.
You were leaving. And I was too late.
Now, sometimes, I find frost on my window and think of your breath fogging the glass above the sink. The way we made coffee like it was something sacred. The way we left without needing to say we’d come closer than we ever would again.
I don’t regret not touching you.
But I do miss the man I might’ve become if I had.
And I hope— in some quiet room of your life— you still carry a small warmth from that night.
Somewhere below the shimmer line where light forgets itself, a whale turns slow in a cathedral of salt— each scar on her skin a stanza.
She sings, not to summon, not to find— but to remember.
A song older than shipwrecks. Older than ropes and sails.
The deep drinks it. Holds it like breath. Lets it echo along trenches where no eyes go, only ghosts and pressure and time without hands.
We used to think it was a beacon, a call to others. But not all songs seek ears. Some are memory made into sound— just one creature telling the dark: I was here.
days of stone 