My birth was violent and nonconsensual. I was built around a speck of dirt—industrial, anonymous, maybe from Cleveland, maybe from a war half a world away—and immediately sentenced to fall.
A tropospheric creation born in the thinness of near-space where the Universe fucks explanation, and everything is frozen honesty. One second, there was nothing but the sub-zero administrative vacuum of the upper atmosphere. A blink, and I was a snowflake: daggered, garish, overdesigned for a lifespan measured in minutes.
Of course, nobody explained the rules. Gravity has no body, a universal constant with resting bitch face. It points down and waits.
Up there, I convinced myself I was briefly invincible. That I was unique among billions, team tumbling in unison, a choreographed white frenzy that looked suspiciously like freedom if you squinted, looked through it, and didn’t dwell on the ending.
The sky was the color of cheap gin, and the wind howled like it was on a deadline. Pitch, yaw, and roll Vitamixed into nausea puree, spun until direction became a foreign language. We formed transient crystalline alliances, then broke apart. It was chaos with a temperature problem.
The wind grabbed me early, treated me like a rough draft. It slashed my trajectory, flipped me end over end, and sent me careening through the air on currents that tasted faintly of exhaust and regret.
I watched others disintegrate mid-fall—caught by warmer winds, midair collisions, redacted without ceremony. No elegies. No moments of silence. Just unfeeling physics doing what it does.
It was chaos with a temperature problem.
I continued to plummet toward a world hastily struggling into focus. Rooftops strained under the weight of winter. White streets gridded, stretched out like tired arguments. Trees stood bare and accusatory, as if they knew the system was rigged but had no choice but to show up anyway. The ground looked solid and final, profoundly uninterested in my life.
Then I saw her.
The little girl, badly bundled by adults who believed that snow was character-building. She stood in the open, this little human, daring the sky to make good on its promises. Her breath puffed out cloudy manifestos, each one a youthful rebellion against the cold. She tilted her head back and stared into the falling madness, innocent eyes wide, mouth open, nose red and exposed like an exit wound.
That’s what I noticed first: her nose. Bright, soft, arrogant. A target.
I tried to drift away. But the wind doesn’t negotiate, and it doesn’t care about intent. It edited my path paragraph down to a single, brutal sentence. One last obscene wobble, and a spin that felt almost theatrical, and then—
Impact.
My death was immediate and gentle, an instantaneous and intimate phase change. There was no poetry or symbolism, only warmth. The sudden collapse by degrees of every sharp angle I’d used to justify my existence. Structure betrayed me without hesitation. I melted into a nothing so complete it didn’t bother to have the decency to feel tragic.
For a moment so brief, so nearly timeless, I was a wet sensation on her skin.
The girl laughed a clean, careless sound and wiped her nose with the back of her mitten.
And then I was gone.
