Wintering with you from afar

This piece is about the grief of the love that never was, a grief that arrives softly like cold wind.

There’s a kind of winter that doesn’t appear on the calendar. It arrives when you realize that

the love you feel has no destination, only a trajectory. Like the frost that forms on windows

overnight, beautiful, fragile, destined to melt with the first ray of sunlight that dares to touch

it.

He and I have retreated into our own inner winters. We still see each other on Tuesdays and

Thursdays, we still have conversations about poetry and philosophy, but something has

changed. We’ve begun to hibernate even in each other’s presence. Like trees that keep their

sap deep within their roots, we preserve what is essential, true love, impossible desire, buried where the cold cannot reach it.

Silence has become our refuge. Not the awkward silence of strangers, but that other kind of

stillness that exists only between those who know each other so deeply that words become

optional. We sit together in the library, reading separate books, and in that shared silence,

there is more intimacy than in any noisy confession. It’s the silence of falling snow: soft,

cumulative, transformative.

My memories of him thaw with painful slowness. Each memory is a block of ice that I must

hold in my hands until it melts enough to reveal what’s inside:

Was it love I saw in her eyes

That rainy Tuesday?

Or was it just the reflection of my own longing?

The process of remembering in winter is like this: imprecise, blurry, like looking through breath condensed

on a pane of glass.

The resistance we practice, seeing each other without touching, loving each other without

saying it, has something sacred and something solitary about it. It’s the kind of resistance that no one applauds because it happens in silence, in private, in the invisible territory of the

heart. We are athletes of restraint, champions of the unspoken. And although it sometimes

breaks me, it also makes me stronger in ways I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t hibernated like this.

He once told me, as we walked through the snow-covered park: “Trees seem dead in winter,

but they’re alive in ways we can’t see.” He wasn’t looking at the trees when he said it. He

was looking at me. And I realized he was talking about us, about this thing between us that

seems dormant but beats with a subterranean vitality, waiting for conditions that may never

come to bloom.

The grief over a love that never was is strange. It arrives gently, like the frost I mentioned

earlier. There’s no dramatic breakup moment because there was never anything official to

break. Just this gradual accumulation of sadness, flake by flake, until one day you realize

you’re completely covered in it. And yet, there is a beauty in this sadness. A purity. Like a

snowy landscape before anyone walks on it and ruins it with footprints.

My breath against the glass of my bedroom window forms patterns that dissipate before I can interpret them. These are my thoughts about him: fleeting, blurry, constantly evaporating

before they can crystallize into certainties.

Does he love me?

Do I really love him, or am I in love with the idea of impossible love?

Winter doesn’t answer these questions. It only preserves them, like insects trapped in amber.

We’re hibernating together but apart. Waiting for a spring that may never come, or that will

arrive only to reveal that what we had could only exist in the cold. There is something

tenderly resilient in this waiting. In choosing to show up week after week, knowing that

nothing will change, yet not wanting it to change either, because change would mean the end of this beautiful and terrible suspension.

The winter of the soul is not about despair. It’s about learning to survive with less light, less

warmth, less certainty. It’s about discovering that in stillness and cold, there’s a clarity the

noisy summer never offers. I’ve become an expert at reading subtle signals: the exact angle of her smile that means “I feel this too,” the particular silence that means “I’m holding back

words I can’t tell you.”

We will continue hibernating. He’s on his side of the distance, I’m on mine. But our roots

beneath the ground are intertwined, nourishing each other with what we cannot express

above.

And when the world grows silent and cold, when everyone else seeks warmth and

noise, we find something more precious: the company of someone who understands that

sometimes loving simply means enduring the darkness together, without promises or

guaranties, just the fragile faith that we’ve survived another winter.

About the Writer: My name is Vivianne, and I'm a Spanish artist and writer currently working on my first novel. When I'm not writing, you'll find me listening to music or studying history. Mythology and history are my passions, and I've always loved exploring new cultures. Drawing is another of my passions besides writing. I've been drawing since I was very young, and it's what introduced me to storytelling.