Her face was pastel white, pale as the winter sky spitting out shards and clumps of ice and snow above her. Her lips were as blood red as the red roses she’d recalled smelling in her dead grandmother’s garden. She seldom wondered why her body was shutting down, or when she would finally perish. The only reality was that it was happening slowly, but surely.

The world around her was blank, along with her mind, thoughts, and faint voice that had reminding her that there was hope. Her vision was not yet blank, despite the water spilling from the ducts of her eyes, but incredibly blurred, clouding her sense of direction. She’d been wandering as long as she could remember, and as far as she was concerned, the storm showed no signs of wishing to release her from its chilling grasp.

“I am dying,” she often spoke, though the only answer she ever received was the ringing in her ears, a result of the fierce, inclement weather.

The snow fell in heaps upon her velvety auburn hair. Her hands felt as if they’d been locked in a freezer set to thirty-two degrees below zero for two hundred years, though they seemed to refuse to release their grip on the slither of warmth radiating from her body. Her deep, green eyes remained prickled with hot tears she hadn't remembered crying. In fact, she hadn't had any recollection of anything. Even her name was a memory long gone. The thin framed girl could faintly recall what banished her to this bitter fate. She ruled out several possibilities.

Hypothermia? No, her pasty skin was warmed by a woven red sweater gifted to her by her mother on a warm Christmas morning, filled with hot chocolate that burnt her tongue and rough textured wrapping paper her three year old sister cut her fingers on. Her memory vaguely began to peek through the crevasses of her deepest mindset.

Cancer? She had never been diagnosed, but what did she know. The adolescent child could hardly distinguish reality and surreality.

Brokenheartedness? No, for who could have loved the brunette with lost, emerald eyes and a scarlet pullover three sizes to large? Who could have ever imagined to find a sentimental value in that confused girl, her thin nose numb from the cold, doomed to relive this abominable blizzard for all eternity?

Her own anguish and suffering caused her knees to buckle beneath her, and tears ran down her pastel white cheeks, that still were as pale as the winter sky that ceaselessly pelted her with ice. Her lips remained as blood red as the roses she’d recalled smelling in her dead grandmother’s garden, and they forever would. She didn’t have to wonder why her body was shutting down anymore, or when she would perish, because it was obvious now.

The reality was: it had already happened.