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.

It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated. I wondered how I could feel so at home in a place that was not mine.

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, such that it only made you angrier and angrier.

I had never particularly wanted children, but somehow I felt the possibility of it now, as lovely and elusive as a poem.

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.

Some piano music was playing, and, after a while, I recognised a few bars. It was the same song I had heard as a student when walking through the university’s music school one evening, during one of those particular solitary, slightly abstract moments when a fragment of music can seem especially beautiful.

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