Its cold today, the type of cold that feels wet and slithers into each gap in your clothes. Snow lamenting its slog as slush across streets and sidewalks. Existence for it is a fate between freezing and melting while the sun plays peek a boo through heavy clouds. The journey ends in storm sewers and drying muck, just a matter of how long before it has lived out its bitter time on the surface.
I'm reminded of another day, similar to today. I found myself on a highway overpass. I'd been walking out in the cold, the snow and slush, the greedy wind snatching warmth from skin, from breath. When the air is cold enough, it feels like a liquid. A liquid that sears your sinus and lungs as it strips the heat from your blood and the soft tissues within.
There on that overpass, I watch fat snow drift lazily to the pavement. The flakes that fell onto the piled snow and ice added their tiny mass to each mound, large or small. Some flakes fell into the puddles of slushy water where they would sit, sometimes for a faint moment, before vanishing as just another drop of water. Some would sit on the water's surface, defiant as a flaked gem of ice for a bit more time. Around me millions of tiny ice crystals fell to a fate determined simply by where they touched the ground amongst others.
All about and through it, cars hissed through the slush on the pavement and asphalt, oblivious to it all.
I didn't jump. But I wanted to.