I am the season of winter.
My frozen breath curdles in the air, retreating into ice before vanishing altogether, and I watch it as it dissolves to nothingness. All around me is a landscape built of hatred, but I am immune to it as no scorpion can be killed by a scorpion's stinger. There is no more pretense because I have not pretended to be another, I have become another. I am strong and I am brittle, with the cold precision of an icicle peering for a skull to splinter. Somewhere a fire burns, but it is a spark fallen from an ancient bonfire now forgotten. They wonder if the world will end in fire or ice. Here, there is no difference.
I am the season of winter.
It is a land without change. The snow does not fall, and the snow does not melt, it simply is, an action that stretches into the distance of time and is swallowed by the horizon. No promises made, no promises broken, no prayers sang, no prayers answered. I know enough not to wish anymore. Or, if I do, to wish for things like ice and frostbite. Never blizzards, never spring. This, after all, is a land without change.
I am the season of winter.
...and I am eternal. Autumn is fragile, sun seasons are fragile, but somewhere winter is an always. It will always be there, it is always at the end of another year holding change and activity. Winter comes to end all in an embrace inescapable, the only vow the earth has the power to keep. The season of death, come again and again with a promise to continue but never a promise to end. I resent this. But resentment is another thing that finds it home here, another poorly done painting to hang on the wall and admire. In the end, I find myself enjoying the cold, even when the frostbite sets in and my fingers harden, then break off.