Final Product

I have been cold all my life. 

My mother often recalled the story of my birth as if it were a ghost story, dramatically recounting how I was a “medical anomaly” that baffled the entire hospital staff. I used to be a "medical miracle," but sometime between my birth and my present my mother decided I was less a gift from God and more a freak of nature. 

Anyhow, I doubt her story is completely true, (she tends to tell it differently every time) but it’s interesting nonetheless. I was born unusually cold. The doctors would have thought me a corpse if not for my incessant wailing. My parents stayed at the hospital for two weeks before the doctors discharged me. “It turns out,” my mother always recalls, “that little icicle had nothing wrong with her besides being a bit chilly.” She’d always take a long sip of wine (which, for some reason, she consistently had with her every time she relayed this so-called tale of woe) before talking about the medical bills I apparently made her pay for her over-extended stay. My mother says that the doctors let me go home because my low body temperature didn’t affect any of my necessary bodily functions. My father says the doctors just gave up. 

In all of my life, my internal temperature hasn’t gone above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. I am perpetually living in a state of cold. Most people, when I tell them this, express their pity for me- “How awful,” they say, “to be freezing all the time!” At which point I have to explain to them that it doesn’t bother me, that there’s no reason to pity me. Unfortunately, most people can’t seem to keep their mouths shut, and often feel the need to provide an unasked for opinion. “If it were me,” they blabber, “I'd want to be warm all the time- I just hate feeling cold.” 

The greatest, most widespread mistake of human speech is the misuse of the word cold. It's a sacred word, yet it's thrown around conversations like dirty clothing carelessly tossed on a bedroom floor. Associating it with pain and discomfort, people often use cold to describe an uncomfortable shuffle through sleet, or the sensation of goosebumps crawling underneath their skin when finding themselves without a coat. Humanity has defined it as nothing but a feeling, reducing its power to a simple descriptor- but true cold is so much more. 

True cold is no feeling. True, unrestrained cold is no descriptor. 

It is a state of being. 

Cold is icy blood running through your veins no matter the outside temperature. Cold is the clingy touch of ice on bare skin, latching onto your lifeforce to drain you of sinful warmth. Cold sticks and doesn’t let go. 

Warm. Eugh- it hurts me to even say the word. Warmth is so good, so pure- so horrendously hypocritical. They say it brings life; when in reality, it brings just as much death as winter. Humans tend to downplay heatstroke for the sole reason that it isn't frostbite. To them; warmth is comfort, to me, warmth is misery. Warmth claws away at my life and tries to disintegrate the icy wall I’ve built to protect myself from the sun’s dominion. It launches itself at the delicate icy crystal in which I find my comfort. Warmth means the corruption of my life, my control, my power. 

My power. Most people don’t call it that anymore, rather, they deem it a curse- not so much a curse on me as it is on them. They fail to understand its importance. 

My gift surfaced when I was a toddler. I started to sneeze icicles, and my tear froze as they ran down my face. My parents didn’t know what to do. They were too paranoid to bring me to doctors- my father thought that if they did I would end up part of a government experiment, and my mother was tired of paying doctor’s bills. I would be thankful for this if it didn’t reflect on their complete lack of sense when it came to taking care of children. The cold raised me better than they ever did. Despite my lonely situation, I look back on that period of isolation rather fondly. I was blissfully ignorant of the outside world’s disgusting warmth, and I found myself thriving in a snowglobe of my own creation. My ice spread throughout my room, coating the walls in intricate designs and the floor in fluffy white snow. My room was my only solace in a home full of people trying to meddle with my life. My parents wouldn’t stop nagging me about the cold that seeped into their space. They tried to introduce me to warmth- their false giver of life. My parents had no idea the pain it brought me to part with the cold, even for a second, and instead insisted on introducing me to their fiery world. A world that slowly destroyed everything I stand for. The audacity of that world was unmatched- how its people generated heat with their very breath, how much of its population has forsaken cold in favor of hellish flames, how it was, thanks to its own people, heating up ever so slowly, destroying paradises of frost. It was a world I would rather die than be part of. I made it known to my parents very early on that I would much rather stay in my snow globe of peace than rot under the gaze of a hot ball of flame. 

They didn’t take to this very kindly.

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