Snow
I love watching the snow fall.
Not only because I come from L2, a colony where water is scarce, rain even more so and snow non-existent – it is 'uneconomical', according to the politicians – but also because I cannot stop marveling at how something so pure, simple and beautiful can also be so foreboding, complex and deadly.
It can be so much fun to romp around in, wrapped up warmly in coats and scarves, making snowballs and snowmen, starting harmless snow fights from which everyone walks away laughing breathlessly, but unhurt. Or lying in a great field of it – was it a parking area for cars in summer? A real grassy field where the grass has died for the winter? – by moonlight, making snow angels with a friend, staring up at the stars. Even simply walking in it is fun, feeling it crunch under your feet as more flakes waft from the sky to settle everywhere, frosting dark hair and clothes, gracing everything mundane with an ethereal air.
But when that light fall of snow thickens, and the wind picks up, driving icy invisible shards unto your face and agitating the previously-soft flakes into a frantic dance, and you suddenly realize that everything around you looks very different and maybe a little scary, that is when the snow becomes sinister. Tales of people walking til they dropped from exhaustion in a snowstorm, unable to see where they are going and eventually dying from suffocation in a custom-made tomb of snow come to mind unbidden. Your eyes search out the next landmark almost-desperately, and the next, and the next…until you finally breath a tiny sigh of relief as you step over the threshold of your home and pretend that you were never afraid. But somehow the snow will never seem quite as pure and beautiful ever again.
The snow is piling up on my windowsill now. Layers of it, building up, and up…pressed against the glass by the wind. For some reason, it actually changes colour as it stacks up. The bottom layers are a kind of grayish colour, while the topmost ones are more white. The difference is a lot more pronounced is the stack has been built over several snowstorms, never melting enough after one to start anew with the next storm.
It's almost like a person. With each experience life throws us, we learn something, our character is molded a little more, and the stuff learnt from previous experiences becomes tamped down into a sort of base to build the new layers on. Just like a bank of snow on a windowsill. If it has a funny hollow in the center, or a rise on one end, the new layer will have the same hollow or rise. After each storm, it melts slightly, just as our ideas and attitudes fade after the incident that creates them, but never fully disappear. The old layers will remain, waiting under the many new layers to come, becoming a firm part of the snowbank – or the person.
Layer upon layer upon layer…they are all me, and yet none of them, individually, are me. I guess the phrase about peeling all the layers of yourself away to reveal your true self contradicts itself, under this analogy. All those layers are you. All one can really do to understand another person is work through all the layers slowly, one at a time.
I watch the snow fall, and I wonder if he will ever be able to dig through all my snowbanks without being suffocated along the way. I wonder if I can dig through his. I like to think we'll both make it out safely.
And maybe after we have dug through all of them, we will lie in the snow fields left behind and make snow angels.
A/N: 1) Duo POV, as if you can't tell.
2) This is all my sister's fault. I'm NOT a fanfic writer, though I read copious amounts of it. I have an account on ff.net, obviously, but it's more of a poetry thing. Unfortunately, we were listening to a CD I like the other day, and she mentioned many of the songs fit various Gundam Wing characters remarkably well. I agreed, and from there grew this crazy idea of writing fics centered around those songs and GW. This is not one of those. It started out as one, but kind of steered itself away before too long. So this goes up alone. Unless the one I'm writing now decides to take control of its own destiny as well.
3) Erm…tell me what you think? In case (2) wasn't clear enough, I've never done this before…