the day i realized i was alive

There are things I’ve only ever said in silence. This might be the first time I’m trying to say them out loud. 
January 21, 2025

I was born and raised in somewhere, nowhere, Florida — where the tallest hill seems like a mountain and everything is always wet, so terribly wet from the thick humidity.
The kind of place where winter feels like a rumor most of the time.

And yet… It snowed. It snowed so much, the sky poured white until the world forgot its shape. Just enough to make the world feel wrong in a way that thrilled me.

I stepped outside, barefoot, toes crunching on snow, to stand on my balcony overlooking a frozen apartment pool. Holding a cigarette in the trained way I’d had before I quit — two fingers, soft grip, pretending I didn’t care that the sudden relapse might make the habit return.
The air bit my skin. My breath curled out of me like a secret.

I’d never seen snow before. Not real snow. Only frost on grass in the early mornings before the sun took it all away, or chunks of hail that could probably kill somebody.

But there it was — steady, unbothered, falling like it meant to stay forever. Not melting. Not rushing. Just… settling.
As if the world had been waiting for this hush all along.

The sky was bruise-dark, it looked as though it would fall right down on everyone like a too-heavy quilt.
Light came from the ground instead of above, and for a moment, I thought I was dreaming.
The most startling part of the ordeal, there was no sound, no birds — just the hush of snow falling.
Just silence. And cold. And awe.

I took a menthol laced drag, freezing my insides and I cringed when the smoke caught on a snow flurry breeze and hit my eye. Next, I laughed at myself for not remembering how to smoke a cigarette properly. I was no longer worried about the habit returning.

Then I just stood there, in the quiet, holding smoke in my lungs and snow in my eyelashes, thinking:
Is this it? Is this what being alive feels like?
Cold. Beautiful. Brief.

No one was there to witness it.
And maybe that’s why it mattered.

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