Glitter
It’s winter’s confetti.
It only appears on the coldest days, days when the sun’s too bright and the wind’s too wild.
It’s the kind of day when, no matter how sunny it is, bed becomes a cradle, a womb, the safest of spaces. In this kind of cold, nothing could possibly be worth the pain of getting up, could it?
Nah.
Except you have to get up; there isn’t a choice; there are chores and tasks and appointments, looooooong appointments, and this is what you signed up for when you wanted so badly to be an adult.
And now you know why the adults didn’t want it.
So you drag yourself out of bed, and you shiver just looking out the window, and you keep the shower as hot as you can stand. And you swill coffee hard until the buzz starts to catch, and you haul yourself to your feet and start the day.
And then you open the door, and the first thing you notice is that the wind is blowing and it slices through your sleeves like a scalpel and you might as well be naked to the world and your shivers turn to shudders and you spin around to shit the door
— and you stop.
Because the wind is moving through, hopping from the willow to the arbor to the aspen to the cedar and then it gets to the other aspens and then it blows the glitter all over the world.
And if you hadn’t gotten up, if you hadn’t opened the door, if you hadn’t stood in the cold, you never would’ve seen the shiny stuff.
You would have had a day without glitter, and you wouldn’t know it, but you’d be a little sadder for it.