On the Poems That Became You’re the Snow

On the Poems That Became You’re the Snow

Snow has a way of gathering in the dark while no one is watching, one weightless flake settling upon another through the long hours of the night, until a morning arrives when you draw back the curtain and find the whole world quietly transformed, and these poems came to me in just that manner, never written with the thought that they would become a collection or that anyone but my own heart would ever read them, only set down one by one in the stillness, each a single flake of feeling that I did not know was accumulating into something until the day I looked up and saw that it had become a winter.

Over the last two years, poetry became the place where my heart went to make sense of itself, to sit with the heaviest of emotions and the longest of seasons until they could be named, and on other days it became the vessel into which I poured a gratitude and a depth of love I had never known before, so that all of it finally had somewhere to fall and gather rather than overflowing with nowhere to go.

It gave me a way to speak what I felt with eloquence and with care, to take the unspeakable weight of the heart and shape it, line by line, into something I could hold up to the light and look at without flinching.

Some of these poems are very vulnerable, written in the raw and trembling hours of loving someone and of grieving someone, and there are poems about love and poems about heartbreak and poems that are nostalgic, glowing with the amber light of childhood, each one set down exactly as it came.

Always Home

Not every poem is made of snow, for some are made of a candle burning on a birthday, or a gift waiting beneath a tree, or a song I have known by heart since I was small, yet they all reach back to the same wonder, to the little girl I once was and to my very favorite memories, and there, in the middle of each one, as though the sky had been keeping a secret all along, I found you standing in that very moment, woven into my earliest sense of myself and into everything I had ever loved, and always, always my home.

These poems are not a collection of the past, for they have been gathered in my heart as one, a single story told through every image I ever loved, with the snow falling softly through all of it.

No Two Snowflakes Alike

It is said that no two snowflakes are ever alike, and of everything I have learned from the rarest and most beautiful snowflake I have ever lived inside, this is the truth that has followed me the longest, for a snowflake begins in the high and silent dark of a winter cloud, where a single invisible mote of dust draws the cold vapor of the sky around itself, and love is gathered the very same way, each small and shining moment drawn toward the one before it, laughter and nearness and long unhurried evenings, until something with its own impossible and intricate design has crystallized out of the quiet and begun, softly, to fall.

It falls through a sky that belongs to it alone, turning slowly in the lamplight of a world no one else will ever walk through, with six delicate arms unfolding in perfect and trembling accord, each one remembering exactly what the others have known, and because the path of every flake is its own, shaped by every current of wind and every shift of cold and warmth it passes through on its long way down, there will never be another one like it, not in all the winters that have been or all the winters still to come.

That is the beautiful and haunting truth of it, that all the goodness you saw in that one person, and all the beauty of what the two of you built together, will never be found again in exactly that way, and that is precisely what makes love so rare and so unrepeatable, because a snowflake cannot be made twice, and the sky itself cannot remember how it was done.

Yet it is also the descent that makes the snowflake, for every storm it passes through is written into its shape, and in the same way the hardships of a love are never wasted, since some weather in the sky will always make the journey harder, and still, over the long life of the snowflake, that very difficulty becomes the frost that sharpens each arm and the wind that carves each curve, the catalyst through which it becomes beautiful.

This past year has taught me to meet the one I love with the gentleness of a soft white hush, and to ask to be met with that same gentleness in return, because I have come to believe that no love is ever so far away that it cannot be found again, for a snowflake carried off by the wind has not been lost but is only still falling, turning slowly through the cold and the dark and the long expanse of a sky that holds it, and somewhere across all that distance it is still descending toward the very place it was always meant to land, still itself, still unrepeatable, and more beautiful for every storm it crossed to get there.

You’re the Snow is the reflection and the collection of being in love, of loving, and of coming to know at last that you were always the snow and always the one.

You were always the snow, and through every season, you are the one again and again.