The blizzard leaves a thick coat of snow that looks as fluffy as cotton. If not for its frigid temperature, it would be the perfect bed, but snow isn't nearly as soft and warm as it looks.

It's an ethereal looking substance when seen under a streetlight, seemingly glowing orange; in the moonbeams and starlight it glows blue. Even in the cold air, the snow doesn't register in your mind that it is making everything colder and it calls out, looking even more inviting.

You find yourself space-walking in waist-deep drifts, out to a patch of untouched white, wanting to make a mattress of it. You lay down in it, marking the area as your own, knowing that when you get up, an imprint of your body will be there - at least as long as the snow is.

As you gaze upward, you start to lose feeling in your ears, the feeling in your nose is next, and after that, you've stopped paying attention. The sky is too beautiful and incomprehensibly infinite for you to care that you feel numb.

To the universe, you are insignificant - nothing - and for a little while, you feel physically as if you are nothing. But looking into the wide, clear, winter sky, you're perfectly okay with this. In fact, there is no other feeling you would prefer.

You can see every star, twinkling and shining, and at first you want to believe it's all for you, but then you think about it for a few more minutes; you realize that for each person there must be five stars (maybe a hundred). With this revelation, you understand that there are people all over the world every night looking up at the same endless sky filled with the same celestial bodies, just as you are right now, and think. You wonder if they think about the same things you do (what do they think about?). You wonder if they feel as contentedly invisible as you do.

A breeze blows over you; by this time, you're so cold, the breeze feels warm. You can hear it whistle softly through bare tree limbs, those same sparse branches reach up into the sky, spindly arms trying to steal the stars from their black-velvet home.

Your eyes start to droop and you yawn, blissfully calm for once; it's time to go inside, warming back up with a cup of tea and lots of quilts.

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