LA PRISE.

Her winds sound like an animal. At times a shrieking eagle, at times a bleating lost lamb. Always there. Always battering the walls of our quarters, always blowing inside my head. Gusting, railing. Always there, until I can’t tell silence from wind, whether it lets up, whether I’m dreaming.

Some days I go outside and stand in the ice-cold winds, let them slap at my cheeks and steal my breath. I hold tight to the lead rope that runs from our kitchen door to the woodshed. In this blinding snow, letting go would mean I might never find my way back. Just ten steps from our door, I might lose my way; freeze to death.

I hold tight to that rope, my fingers stiff beneath my mitts, my skin burning in the cold.

Trying to remember what I’m holding on for in this smothering dark.

Because there comes a point during the winterkill when you can’t remember it being any different. You can’t imagine it being different.

You can’t imagine you ever felt the sun-filled breeze warm your skin. Can’t imagine that your heart swelled at the sounds of birds and trees around you. Can’t imagine that you ever felt those warm hands in yours.

And you can’t follow the thread in your mind back to those moments, because it’s all too far away, and the days are too short and the darkness too long.

The despair is too deep.

Always there. Gusting. Railing.

The loss is like a sickness. It hangs about you, pulls at your skin, muddies your thoughts. Makes you want to give up, let go of the lead rope, head into those death winds.

Give yourself over to La Prise for good.

And yet.

The very blackest depths of that sickness, the furthest bottom of that hole—it has something to tell you. Hollowness means there was once a fullness; suffocating absence means there was once a presence. And if you let yourself listen, and think on that, you remember that it used to be different. You realize something more was possible. Is possible.

And in that howling silence, you can hear it: your secret heart beating.

Hold on. Hold on.

So instead of losing your path, instead of letting the winterkill have its way, you hang tight to that rope. You pull yourself hand over hand back to the warmth.

You wait out the dark.

You wait for the Thaw.