Day 122 - I think the snow has saved me.
After Granite Falls things felt impossible. I don’t know what I had hoped to find there, perhaps some sort of community of isolated, incurious people I could move with for a time, but they were the same as everywhere else.
I walked back convinced I was being followed, not from any evidence, but because the forgotten sensation of being watched lingered as an unfamiliar breath on the back of my neck.
I planted out my winter greens in the shadow of that fear, watched their withered little fingers crawl from the hardening earth and wondered if I wanted to make it to Spring and another year of this.
And then the snow fell and I was safe. In this thick, white blanket sounds travel twice as far and footprints stick. Every morning I can walk the edge of my sanctuary and know, by the pristine surface, that nothing bigger than a bird has come for me in the night. The snow has cleaned me the same way it has the landscape, filling in the dark cracks with glittering perfection that will last for a time.