Snow fell on my head.
I stood on the roof, staring down at the concrete that waited for me like an open jaw.
Every breath was a battle, air scraping my throat raw as tears and spit froze in crooked trails across my face.
My body trembled, not from fear, but from exhaustion so deep it felt carved into my marrow.
I had run until my legs split. I had hidden until my lungs tore.
Every alley, every shadow, every leap, yet the past still stalked me, dragging its claws down my spine, whispering my nightmares with a demon's patience.
My hands were slabs of ice, mottled violet and black. My jaw barely moved; the cold had stolen even my grimace. My eyes, once bright, now stared in a dull haze, blurry like the memory of feeling warmth
I kept moving long after my wounds opened, long after the blood froze against my skin like rusted armor.
It didn't matter. Pain had become a familiar predator, chewing at me in the dark, leaving bite marks shaped like winter.
I knew once I reach The Sun, the cracking inside me would finally stop.
Your smile would scorch through the frost gnawing at my bones.
Your touch would cauterize every wound the cold had carved into me.
That Your voice, quiet, deep, merciless, would flood me with warmth so fierce it would strangle the winter out of my lungs.
If You knew what I crawled through for a glimpse of You. If You knew how many pieces of myself I left behind, frozen in the snow.
I wanted Your hand on mine, hot enough to blister.
Your warmth spreading through me like venom, a drug potent enough to rot my reason,
something to blind me and bind me.
If You commanded me to eat the apple, I'd devour the core, seeds and all, tearing into it with bloodied teeth.
Then a voice, sharp as steel:
"It's time to let go."
I turned.
And there He was, The Sun,
but not the The Sun I worshipped.
Something cruel stared back at me, something carved from cold light and old hatred.
His eyes were twin blades, gleaming, merciless.
"I crossed seas and mountains, I crawled through Heaven's teeth and Hell's throat. I drowned in oceans of pain just to find You." I said, voice breaking like old glass.
The Sun stepped closer, the rooftop groaning under the weight of something divine and dead.
He faced me, eyes burning with a darkness that wasn't flame, but the memory of it.
I grabbed His hand. It was colder than a corpse. Colder than surrender.
I looked into His face. What stared back wasn't The Sun I knew. It wasn't salvation.
Just a shell, empty and blind, a sun hollowed out and left to rot in the sky.
The Sun would never warm me. Its fire had bled out long ago.
And in the end,
it's not flame that destroys the fastest.
It's cold. Cold that bites, rips, and burns without mercy.
Because nothing burns like cold.
