stillness in snow lubna najm

There is a stillness in my joints; a silence

from the absence of movement. There is an emptiness in my heart, a heart that has forgotten its rhythm. It doesn’t stumble, it doesn’t stutter, it doesn’t feel or think or pump blood. It’s immobile, paralyzed, wrapped in a sheer snow blanket. Icicles hang from its aorta, the heart’s crown now a heavy burden.

There is a stillness hanging in the air; no breaths escape my lips to paint the world with clouds. Buried alive, buried in snow so deep that a hypnotizing white is my reality. A sparkling white — dazzling, blinding. My eyelids frozen, my tears like diamonds studding my cheeks. Am I sparkling and pale, like the snow that surrounds me?

There is a frozen smile on my lips.

The snow has become my home, my refuge from the heat of the world. A safe haven from the chaos of movement. I remain frozen. It’s so easy to stay frozen. To drown in a sea of snowflakes. To barricade in a battlement of stillness. I am alive and whole … and moving for the first time in an eternity.

I can pull myself out of this snow coffin, made of ice daggers and knives of cold.

I hide in stillness. I hide in ice and snow and numbing pain. In my fears I remain.

Immobile. Empty. Still.

Can there be darkness in blinding white snow?

Can there be love in a blanket of fear?

Can there be movement in an eternity of stillness? All my life thinking it would be so difficult to see the other side, beyond the stillness of snow.

But snow can be loose, it can be soft, it can be broken.

I can pull myself out of the snow. I am not still anymore. x

A twitch at my left pinky. A twitch, like a spark of fire resonating through my body, blinding its wsenses in pain. I have forgotten how to move, and my body feels the pain of remembering.

I am remembering.

That darkness is a blessing.

That fear can bring about love. That you can move, you don’t need to be still.

You don’t need to stay here, cowering in your prison of ice and snow. You don’t need to bury yourself, not when there is a life to live. It just takes one twitch, one choice, one movement...

A breath escapes my lips, shivering lips that can remember the clouds they create.

A beat takes a hold of me, a pulse remembering homebound paths, carrying the heat of my blood.

A teardrop is born from blinking eyes, from moving eyes, that seek for more than blinding light. That seek more than perfection.

A frozen smile, melting into emotion.

Stillness in Snow

WORDS by LUBNA NAJM ART by JAVAN WELLUM

ART by BROOKLYN MORRIS