When Snow Falls
If I told myself Emma was just a harmless crush, I'd be lying — just as I lied yesterday, and the day before that.
The truth is simpler and far crueller: I've fallen headlong into something I can barely name. Every morning, I walk the silent corridor to the café where she waits, my pulse hammering like I'm about to leap off a cliff. I rehearse confessions on the drive over — careful, practiced words that never survive the moment our eyes meet.
Because the instant I see her, language abandons me.
It's maddening, this sweet torment — love pressing its weight into my ribs like an ache I can't soothe. I'm caught at a crossroads I didn't know existed, torn between the man I've been and the man I become in her presence. When she isn't there, the world feels muted, edges dissolving into fog. When she is, every nerve in me wakes as if I've been living underwater and finally broken the surface.
She sees me — or at least, I believe she does. That illusion alone is enough to make me feel alive again.
I dream of making promises she could keep in her bones: to shield her from storms, to trace constellations from the sound of her laughter, to guard every quiet ache she hides from the world. I imagine our confessions spilling softly between us — words traded in the hush before dawn, fears cupped in trembling hands like fragile birds.
But the truth is, I am fractured — a man split between grief and longing, stranded by my own silence.
If only she could read the tremor in my voice, the hesitation in my gaze — if only my soul could speak without words. Then maybe she'd understand: I don't just want her.I need her — the way the lost need direction.
I sank into the leather chair, the air heavy with varnish and memory. My violin stood in the corner, patient and unplayed, its shadow stretching long across the oak floor.
Three hours had slipped by. The blank sheet before me gleamed under the sun like a mirror — reflecting nothing but the quiet failure of my own restraint.
The afternoon light flooded through the tall windows, fingers of gold brushing the desk, begging me to fill the silence. Yet its warmth barely reached me. I was trapped somewhere between presence and absence, between the man who had been and the one still searching for a reason to stay.
Every time my eyes drifted to the violin, a dull ache tightened my chest. This room — once Alex's sanctuary — was a mausoleum now. I could almost hear his laughter echoing through the rafters, could almost believe he'd step in, chin lifted, bow raised, ready to coax beauty from the air the way only he could.
He was eighteen when Father christened this space Alex Ardel Studio — brass letters bright as pride. Now those same letters bear my name, polished and hollow.
Father pretends Alex never existed. Pretends the ghost that walks our halls doesn't wear his son's face.
But I feel him. In every chord, every breath, every failure that sits between notes.
So I play — clumsy, hesitant — forcing bow against string until the sound splinters into something too human to be beautiful. I tell myself it's for him, that if I play long enough, maybe he'll hear me. Maybe he'll find his way back.
But each note is a blade, cutting deeper than the last. Every measure hurts. Every silence hurts more.
Still, I keep playing. Because to stop would mean accepting that he's truly gone.
Then, without warning, something shifted.
Like a bell tolling in my ribs, I remembered the dream — the one that had shaken me awake before dawn, leaving my palms cold and my pulse unsteady. I'd been wandering through memories of Alex, chasing shadows that vanished when I reached for them.
And then — a snowflake.
It drifted through an open window, silent, perfect, landing in my palm.
It didn't melt. It stayed.
I don't know why that image gripped me the way it did. But when I lifted my pen and touched it to the blank page, the words fell like thawing ice.
When snow falls…
Three small words. But they cracked something open in me.
Suddenly, language surged like floodwater. The emptiness I'd carried for months was replaced by motion — frantic, urgent, alive. I wrote without thinking, without fear. Words bled into sentences, sentences into pages: frost on windows, breath like smoke, hearts thawing in the hush of a winter dawn.
The sound of my pen filled the room like music. Each stroke was a heartbeat, every page a gasp for air.
When at last I looked up, a mountain of pages lay before me — a fever dream made real. I laughed under my breath, the sound sharp, disbelieving. The air shimmered with that strange energy that comes right before a storm.
Emma's name hovered in my mind, soft as a prayer I didn't deserve to say.
I didn't notice the knock at first.
"Come in," I called.
Michael stepped through the door, shoulders slumped beneath invisible weight. The light from the hearth brushed across his tired face, gilding the dark circles under his eyes.
He closed the door softly and crossed the room to the sofa by the fire. The leather creaked as he sank into it, head falling back, breath leaving him in a weary sigh.
"Rough night?" I asked, though my voice still trembled with leftover adrenaline.
"You could say that," he murmured. Then his gaze fell to the scattered pages on my desk. "You've been busy."
I slid one toward him, ink still damp. "Something finally came back."
He read a line, his expression unreadable. Then his eyes lifted to mine — steady, knowing."I've never seen you like this before," he said quietly. "You look… alive."
Alive.
I turned toward the window, where the sun was fading into snowlight, and for the first time in months, I felt that he might be right.
Somewhere between the ghost of my brother and the gravity of a woman I can't name aloud, I had begun to remember what it meant to feel human.
And it terrified me.