What the Cold Knew First

When winter finds the cracks,
it crawls inside them
slow, certain,
like a surgeon of ruin
numbing what it plans to take.
It maps the soft parts of me
with a precision
I’ve never offered myself.
Cold knows what warmth tries to hide.
I feel it settle behind my ribs,
curling into the hollow
I pretend isn’t there.
It fits too easily.
Like it’s been waiting
for a place like this.
And the sick thing is
I let it.
Not because I want the cold,
but because I’m tired
of being the only one
who knows where it hurts.
Winter listens.
More than people ever have.
When it presses against my pulse,
it isn’t checking if I’m alive
it’s checking
how much of me isn’t.
People think dark nights are quiet,
but quiet has a sound
when you’re falling apart.
A slow dragging,
a heavy breathing,
the creak of something inside you
giving way
inch by inch.
Winter hears it.
Every fracture.
Every old wound reopening
like it missed the light.
It collects the pieces
I drop in the dark
the shattered thoughts,
the half-formed fears,
the confessions I swallow
so I don’t have to hear them aloud.
And it holds them
the only way it knows how:
cold, tight, relentless.
There are nights
I feel the frost crawl
up my throat,
wanting out
wanting to speak
the things I’ve buried so deep
they only surface
when I’m too exhausted
to shove them back down.
Nights where the world
turns white outside
and black inside,
and I realize
I can’t tell the difference
between numbness
and surrender anymore.
The cold keeps asking questions
I don’t want to answer:
What did you lose?
Who abandoned you first?
Why do you still wait for footsteps
that will never return?
Who taught you to become silence
before you became anything else?
It asks,
and I break.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
But in the way that snow collapses
quiet, inevitable,
as if it was always meant to fall.
I sit in the dark
and winter sits with me,
and neither of us speaks
because both of us already know
there are truths
that bruise too deep
to be touched with words.
And this is the part
I never want to admit
the part that’s uglier
than any pain I’ve learned to hide:
Winter doesn’t scare me.
Living does.
Because winter takes
what it touches
but life keeps asking
for the pieces
you don’t have left.
So the cold stays.
A witness.
A weight.
A keeper of the version of me
I won’t show anyone else.
Not to freeze me,
not to spare me,
not to save me—
but to remind me
every time I breathe
that some parts of me
went quiet so long ago
I can’t remember
if they died
or simply stopped expecting
to be heard.
That’s the truth
under all this ice:
the cold didn’t hollow me out
it just named the emptiness
I’d been carrying
far longer
than anyone ever noticed.
And the cruel part is
emptiness doesn’t stay empty.
It learns the shape of you,
echoes inside you,
sharpens itself
on every soft thing you lose.
People ask why I shut down
when someone reaches for me;
why warmth feels dangerous,
why kindness feels like a trap.
I never know how to say
that the cold got to me first.
That winter didn’t break me;
it simply revealed the ruins.
Lifted the frost just enough
to show the shattered pieces
I’d been stepping around
in the dark.
Everyone else pretended
not to see the cuts.
Pretended not to bleed.
Pretended I wasn’t already
splintered down the center
long before the snow came.
Maybe that’s why the cold
feels honest
in a way no one else does.
It doesn’t soothe,
doesn’t soften,
doesn’t lie.
It just tells the truth
I’ve never had the courage
to speak aloud:
I was broken
before anyone touched me.
Winter only turned
the lights on