The world rested softly on the dark tee of her shoulders, pressuring her boots into the snow. One of a simpler nature would refer to the sky and ground as "white," but her trained eyes identified subtle shades of blue, pink and orange. She wondered what the proportions would be, of white to the color, to achieve the faint hues.
She was alone. She had ventured ahead of the group, trudging along the slush coated streets, engendering her early arrival at the back of the house. Their voices rang out in the cold air. Excitable, infallible. All of their coats, scarfs and hats as dark as her own, but none quite as painfully aware of the light and sound. Of reality.
It was not a headache. When she tried to describe her awareness, that was what other people related to: A headache. Did the winter pain them, gnaw deep into their bones and somehow settle there, unmelted even in summer? Was the dark lace of the trees incomprehensible to them without shooting pains in their frontal lobe?
She sighed, watching as her former breath whitened, drifting heavenward. In her keyless impatience she had journeyed to the back of the yard, leaving gaping holes in the virgin snow. She could stand there, she was sure, for hours, uninterrupted, captive to the rough planks of her neighbors privacy fence, the curling, spiraling, ever-spreading vines of the fallen wisteria, the manner in which the dripping ice formed Chihuli's of the perennial plants, the bounce of sound from surface to surface. She could stand, internalising the cold, the flat blinding light, for a long while.
But she couldn't stand them.
They were too much unaware. Too much of themselves to notice. They were as old or as young as she was, but they would take decades longer to make notice of the light in the tree branches at sunset, or the blue gas flame skirting a white kettle. But even so, when the door groaned open, she turned slowly from her place, and followed her own footsteps back to the door.
