The snow would never tell you, but it remembered. It was a tempestuous thing but always quiet, perhaps as apology—repentance—for having remembered anything at all. Because it remembers, though it shouldn’t, the feeling of lungs bound in gasps and a throat worn numb by chill. The feeling of frostbite and dying breaths and the light of a single flame. The snow remembers very little. But it remembers him.
He remembers chasing.
He does not remember, though the snow does, the feeling of stumbling over frozen banks and burnishing his heels on needle flakes; ice crystals that tore through the air—catching on his skin, running through his hair, and turning his eyelashes to ice sheets.
He does not remember, frost burned and snow blind, because all he remembers is the important part.
He remembers nothing of the journey, only that it had a goal.
He’d run without the slightest warning, because she had. He’d run and hadn’t stopped, even when his socks rolled down his ankles and his shoes peeled off, even when his sleeves gathered at his elbows and all his skin went alive at first brush with the cold, first goosebumped, then burning, then nothing. And he ran even still.
He ran because she surely would be, untamed by mere blizzard, unbowed before storm. He ran and he found it to be much easier than all that. All he had to do, after all, was follow her. He could not see her, but he knew where to run. Knew his true north like a snowbird.
He ran until it was all of him, until his heartbeat was the punch of each footstep into the snow, and his lungs moved only by the pump of his swinging arms. Until all he was was the temper in his chest, and the chase.
And he remembers very little of it, though the snow remembers it all. His heart was something fervent and untamped, the heat of a thousand flames.
All he remembers is the fire, though the snow remembers the way it melted through him, past brittle bones and frosted flesh, until that icy corpse couldn’t hold itself together. Melted thin then melted broken. Crumbling and warping, until he stumbled his last. Prone in the snow, limbs limp and joints unbending.
It was the dull tone of a numbing ring, the endless white. A flame burning on kindling, unextinguished, and yet unmoving.
And the snow remembers, though it shouldn’t, what it felt like to die.
The slowing of a heart, the rasp of lungs.
The very last blink.
It chases even still. With each lattice of snowflake, with each billow of the wind, with every crack of a tree branch stretching into the far distance. It knows its true north like a snowbird. It is something below consciousness, something more than instinct.
In an endless blizzard, untamed by time, unbowed before season.
A boy chases forevermore.