Cold - TG

I shiver in the night, the artic air wrapping around me as my lips begin to turn. My hands won't obey me, and I can't feel my feet, but neither will stop moving, striding forward deeper and deeper into the snow as the tears freeze on my cheeks. I can't breathe; it hurts too much, every breath a jagged layer of ice to course down my lungs and cut me on the way out again. I can't move, every step another realization of how numb my bare feet are, as they crunch down on icicles until they bleed, the blood turning solid and cutting into me more with every step. More tears. More ice. Less pain.

I try to call out her name, but I'm not even sure the sound makes it past my lips before the wind rips them away. It cuts into my lips, freezing them blue as I collapse to the ground. It cuts into my hands, the ice entering my veins as it cuts deep within me, dragging me down. It tells me that I should give in, should let it take me to the warmth my tears demand, but I fight it. The winter tells me that it's better to give in, but I won't go… won't leave her. I whisper it's name, and it whispers its resignation, promising to help as it drags me further down again.

It's rubbing against my arms, digging into my flesh and turning it blue. I'm not breathing anymore, not feeling a thing as I sink through the snow, the pressure building around me. My legs are narrowing, turning blue as the clothes around me are ripped free, my skin turning slippery with blood too cold to even melt. I feel it inside me, deep in my chest as it presses inward, filling them with blood and ice as they grow outward. The tender flesh is cut, and changed,, but they keep growing, burying themselves into that which has already consumed me.

I can feel it in groin, too, pushing inside me, taking the place of my manhood as it slides inside my body, the blood pouring forth as it digs into my skin, into my nipples, into every hole in body as it grows and shifts and shrinks. My face is encased in it, my eyes nothing but jewels of frozen tears as it slides down my belly and the hair slides down my back, and every inch of it is blue.

Red white and blue made me world, and now they make my death, just like they made hers, out there somewhere. But I'm still moving, anyway, pushing out of the ice as it slides from my body. The wounds are sealing over, the throbbing pain between my legs dissolving to the numbness of the world as I stare out, the red dripping across my body before sliding to the snow and melding with the flakes. I am the ice, the cold, the death. I am the winter that never ends, the loss that never quite recovers.

I am looking for her, but she has yet to be found. Maybe she's by a fireside, drinking soup as she recovers from the world that had abandoned her, and refused to help me. Maybe she's buried beneath the ice and the snow where I will never find her until I fall. I don't know. I should stop looking, should let my skin melt and my brittle hair fall off. But I keep looking.

Because I love her.