Outside, looking in, I'm feeling lost and cold as sin.
Huddled up on her porch, I wasn’t sure if I was welcome in.
My lungs were coated with a thick sheen of frost.
With each exhale, they became a bit more solid.

Oxygen slowly seeped out: thick and sweet as honey,
as my cheeks were powdered with scarlet.
I took out my hands from the pockets of my peacoat,
the joints of my fingers shivered and I rang the doorbell.
The sky was a nebulous, opaque white,
leaping outward, with strokes of light.

I heard pounding footsteps growing closer
with deliberate, feverish, haste.
Locks shifted, clicked and were undone.
She stood in the doorway,
under the lit shower of a crystal chandelier:
liquid sunshine raining clear.
Her arms reached towards me,
feeding my roots, which extended
further into the soft crust of the hearth.
But I sensed contemplation in her bold blue eyes
and fatigue that could not be explained.

My pupils snaked around the room anxiously,
searching for an answer,
And her lips parted, as if she’d found one for me.
But barely a squeak was sounded.
Her mind was like the expensive room in every house
that no guests were permitted to enter.

Eyelids draped over her thoughts like velvet lampshades
covering a forever burning light. Underneath them,
worries circumnavigated the lumination.
Just as moths flutter a trail of smooth ribbon ‘round a streetlight,
once they enter the cycle, nothing could lead them out.
And then I understood; I knew all and well.

She was still young,
She was still growing,
but the new threat of winter could cut her life short.
Like the branches of the anxious green sapling,
her arms, now folded, were twisting together,
quivering in the harsh threat of winter weather.
The wind caught a white flake, soft as a plume
A subtle alarm of impending doom.