Crystallised

I can smell the snow hours before it breaks free from the clouds. I always know when it is going to snow.

My mother said there was a touch of the fae in our family, and feeling the snow was part of this fae magic. It was this feeling that had me walking through the silence of the village in which I lived at 3am on Christmas morning.

I walked until it began and then I sat upon a bench and watched it blanket the world in white. The children waking soon would feel delight to see the winter wonderland outside their window.

I had stopped crying some time ago but the cold still hurt my lungs.

The dress hanging from my bedroom door was the same pure white colour as the snow at my feet, but I didn't want this life I had found myself in. I wanted the simplicity of the snow.

The moonlight made the ground glisten as if one million crystals were dancing upon the surface. I found it so much more beautiful than the man who was suffocating me, whose ring pinched my finger uncomfortably, who I was supposed to marry three days from now when the snow would already be gone, and I knew then, as I sat with the snow, that the path I had to take that night had crystallised in front of me. It was the path that would take me as far away from that man as possible, to freedom.