Sometimes I will let myself believe that there is nothing at all lurking behind those eyes— greenish blue, now, glistening behind lashes fluttering open and closed with the weight of half-awoken sleep. That— like everything else out there in the blustery cold— there is only pure white snow, erasing the landscape and quietly smothering its memory.

I’d like to believe that I can be blind to the strain and struggle I see in them sometimes— not when the television annoyingly steals the hanging space in the air, when re-runs of Jersey Shore bronze and re-bronze the screen— but in that second when our faces are close and breaths collide and those eyes tell me that the decision has been made.

And I will admit— to many things, but here, now, it’s this— to making that decision too.

While the snow piles up— flake atop flake— we’ve chosen to let it bury us both. And deeper and deeper with nothing but the white in every direction— but most importantly, up— it feels like somehow we can ignore everything outside of the guiltiest comfort of each other’s touch, and how skilled we’d become with each other’s bodies.

But that’s a lie— like all other myths of New York City winters— and when it is all shoveled, cleared, melted, and gone, what’s left will show just how it well survived the onslaught of snow. Just how resilient it really was. And just how little things change.