Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

Maybe it’s good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.

That I could let life happen to me in a sense, and that perhaps this was the deeper truth all along, that we controlled nothing and no one, though really I didn’t know that either.

she was not ashamed of the drama, as my family would have been, but inhabited it with rage and sadness, as if it were the cloak of some great animal that she had just slain.

always chose the same ones and sat on the same stool at the end of the kitchen counter, rather than at the big dining table or the smaller table near the conservatory, as if keen to make my presence in the house as light as possible.

The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak.