A crisis of understanding

Snow freezes in its fall, lingering in the sky and above the ground. All sound gets sucked up, soaked up in the flakes as a hush settles down around your shoulders and nestles up behind your ears daring you to make a sound. I'm too scared to, I don't know about you.

I'm prone to wander. I'm prone to leave the God I love.

But I fight it and I push it back and I remember that the impossible is what makes my life worth living. Life is just the membrane, living is the fruit inside. But sometimes everything I want and feel is soaked up, sucked into the frozen snow. What I know to be true and lovely is broken into thousands of tiny pieces that fit nicely in the cracks of miniscule ice crystals and I wonder if it will ever be warm enough to get them out.

My breath clouds into the black space, light bouncing off the snow on the ground and the snow in the air to cut though my exhale. An elk fades into view. I wonder if he's symbolic. I don't move. He looks around. The stars begin to separate themselves from the snowflakes. The world is coming into view and I can feel love beginning to thaw under my frozen skin and the snow begins to move. It drifts down, leaving my hope and faith lingering in its ghostly shadow, hanging in the air between me and the animal. I breathe. It breathes. Everything is collected in the plumes and I feel my faith begin to take a beautiful, shapeless form. The deer turns and leaves me quickly. I feel the blood rush to my face as my heart begins to beat again.