Yesterday I finally looked at the sky, and realized there was a moon up there. As obvious as it may sound, the fact that I had to notice at all told me a lot about myself; mostly that I have forgotten to recognize the things that have always mattered to me when I was most alone.
The very long treks I have made this winter had been accompanied with a deeply internalized grief, so internalized that I failed to look outward, at my immediate surroundings. The cold, the uniform white and gray which melded so seamlessly with the uniform gray sky surrounded me like a cocoon. I was suffocating and choking, and my breathe froze almost before it had even left me. Sometimes I was frozen dry, brittle and ready to shatter, and sometimes I discovered rivulets of tears joining the falling fat snowflakes that fell, the way I had fallen.
Nevertheless, the moon had remained aloft, the way it had always been, and the way it always will be, high above, it, too, was alone. Maybe it took the rays of a setting sun, or the blowing gales of snow from roofs, or even the glint of shards of moon to adorn a cloudy, starless sky, but I remembered.
Even from the cocoon, the butterfly eventually emerges.
