Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

The rain was gentle, and consistent. It left a fine layer of water on the ground, which was not asphalt, but a series of small, square tiles, if you cared enough to notice.

perhaps I felt that this would put us on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers.

It struck me that the last time I had been here, I was with Laurie, and thinking on and off about my mother. And now, I was here with her, thinking on and off about him, about how we had rushed around the city from morning to long after dark, seeing everything, taking in everything.

It was the way I had imagined parks to be in my childhood, wooded and dim and wet, a world within a world.

They reminded me of the seasons and, in their bare, visible threads, of something lovely and honest that had now been forgotten, a thing we could only look at but no longer live.

And yet there was something about the subtropical feel, the smell of the steam and the tea and the rain. It reminded me of her photographs, or the television dramas we had watched together when I was still young. Or it was like the sweets she used to buy for me, which no doubt were the sweets her mother used to buy for her.

But, witnessing her daughter, it was like remembering the details of a dream she once had, that perhaps, at some point in her life, there had been things worth screaming and crying over, some deeper truth, or even horror, that everyone around you perpetually denied, which only made you angrier and angrier.

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.

I learned too that the landscapes were not done only with paint, but via a kind of printing with oils and plates and paper, finished sometimes with pastels, and it was these second or third impressions that gave them their forgotten quality, like things glimpsed and remembered from the window of a speeding train.

each still contained a world unto itself, of cities and ports, of mornings and evenings, of trees and paths and gardens and ever-changing light. Each showed the world not as it was but some version of the world as it could be, suggestions and dreams, which were, like always, better than reality and thus unendingly fascinating.

Such was their remorse, that they took this incident, which could have vanished into history, and made with it some of their most lasting and tragic art.

I was fascinated with how the characters spoke in great figurative monologues, giving full voice to their rage and grief with a precision that would have been impossible in any real speech.

The girl knew so much without seeming to try, and she seemed complete, defined in some way that I wasn’t.

It was as if this knowledge was truly an elixir, a drug.

I too could be confident, and my thoughts felt rapid and full. But all the same, I felt that there was something else, something fundamental, that I did not understand.

I was worried that my earnestness was overdone, and that far from impressing her, it would lead her to dislike me, so at the same time, I kept a calm, restrained facade, which I realized seemed to suit me as well.