Nineteen degrees.


Yes, it was cold at my bus stop, but I didn’t feel all that different. The still air felt like trillions of microscopic needles hovering just millimeters over my skin. All they needed was that push- that push of the wind.


Everything just needed a push to get going.


All they needed was a push to plummet.


I was staring straight forward, inspecting the road across from me. I may have looked like a statue to the people behind me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about them. They could think what they wanted, and I didn’t think about them at all. That was precisely the reason I wasn’t turned toward them, chatting with them, socializing. I detested them, and they didn’t exist to me.


My breathing was silent and hardly even visible. It should have been turning into fog in front of me, but even I didn’t notice it. I imagined myself full of the fog, or maybe even a smoke- like a chimney. That’s a rough explanation of what I was, anyway. I was just hollow and full of nothing but steam or smoke or whatever visible gas there is.


I wished that the sides of the street were much closer together, smaller than an alley. I wished for this unique structure for no apparent reason, like many things I wished for. Maybe I just yearned to lean over and knock on the window of the house across from me, to balance on the power lines between us. Where could someone do that? Who could say that they leaned across their street and touched the house across them without sounding insane?


Hardly anyone.


I shifted my feet slightly. The statue was coming to life, apparently.


My eyes felt glassy. Some people say that their eyes look glassy, but to feel glassy? That’s unique. The eyes slid around easily, due to excess lubrication from my tears, I supposed. I felt no need to blink and took advantage of that. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me.


What if the biting cold actually froze the tears in my eyes? This thought seemed undeniably random, but it was something to ponder. I enjoyed pondering this, and hoped that someone in Siberia was having their eyes frozen at that very moment.


The sky held nothing. It was white. I might as well have been living in a drawing in which the artist simply forgot to add color to the sky. I could imagine him thinking about what the drawing was missing,


“I feel like I’m forgetting something,” he would say. “Hm…Oh well.”


The wind was blowing the powder of the snow around in tight spirals. Maybe it wasn’t the wind that did this. For all I knew, it could have been an invisible octopus swinging its tentacles as it waltzed down the road. For all I knew, I knew nothing.


For all I knew, my reality was fiction.


The bus pulled up.


I boarded and smashed into a wall of warm air.


Vaguely, I wondered if the wind could even exist if I didn’t feel it.


Outside, the world was frozen.