Jules Conklin ’25
I.
The first snowfall arrives. It’s quiet. Not even the air stirs. The world feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting. Waiting for me to remember something. I stand at the window, palms pressed against the glass. My cold fingertips tracing the frost, tracing time. What is time, really? If time is elastic, as Sartre suggests, then the snow stretches it, linking my memory to the moment it lands. But the snow does not care. It does not think. It just falls.
But it’s not weightless, is it? Like Bruegel’s painted hunters trudging through a snow-covered valley, it carries everything—every flake, every moment frozen in air before it hits the ground, vanishing without a trace.
Outside, the streets are empty, yet the hum of streetlights seems to be louder than ever. How can silence be so loud? However, the world does not quiet; we do. We shrink, smaller and smaller, beneath the weight of everything buried under the white.
II.
“Magic,” we used to say. The snow, the way it melted on our hands and tongues. Each flake disappears in an instant. It felt like the world was offering us something secret, something fleeting. A trick of time, maybe. But was it ever magic? Or was time simply running too fast for us to notice?
Back then, everything felt alive. The sharp sting of the wind bites our faces. Did we know it was biting, or did we think it was part of magic too?
I felt enchanted, but I was just falling. I remember the snow, soft and deep, how it seemed to wait for me, catch me, protect me. We never thought about what was underneath, did we? What was melting below us, while we played, unaware of how quickly it would all disappear? We called it magic, but maybe that was just to avoid seeing it for what it really was: fragile, fleeting.
III.
Soon, everything will be different. The city will change, grow, shrink, repeat. The greenbelt behind my house, where the coyotes once roamed, will be gone. Replaced by rows of houses that all look the same. No more magic.
But the snow will come and hide everything, right? Snow is like a mask, perfect in its stillness, covering cracks and scars beneath it. But when it melts, the world reappears. Raw, unchanged, and impossible to ignore. The same snow will no longer feel like it belongs. It will not be the same, not anymore. The plows will push it aside. The salt will eat it away.
What’s left? Nothing but my memories. Snow doesn’t stop the world from changing. It only pretends to, covering up everything to make us forget, just for a moment. But I will not forget. I know what’s still beneath — the cold, the emptiness. It always stays.
IV.
Maybe it’s not about magic, or the snow at all. Maybe it’s about the silence, the waiting. The held breath, just before something falls, just before something breaks. The snow settles, still and quiet, like a sigh of grief. But it does not last. The snow never lasts. It doesn’t stay. It melts, vanishes, and sometimes it never comes at all. And so, we waited again. For the snow to come, to cover us. For a chance to forget. A chance to bury what we cannot bear to face.
V.
Maybe it’s not about the snow. Maybe it’s about what we choose to bury underneath it.