Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

count for something; I had become addicted to the tearing of my thoughts, that rent in the fabric of the atmosphere.

Somehow, it felt like I was living my life from the outside in. I picked up objects that had long been mine – clothes, make-up, books – and at times it was as if they did not belong to me but were a stranger’s. I looked at the white pot with the tiny feet, out of which a bonsai had once grown, and for a brief moment despised it. I looked at the little blue and white bowls in our kitchen. We ate regularly out of these bowls. They were exactly the same as the ones

Sometimes, I looked at a painting and felt completely nothing. Or if I had a feeling, it was only intuitive, a reaction, nothing that could be expressed in words. It was all right, I said, to simply say if that was so. The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak.

said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.