Sometime around 11 in the morning, you get out of bed, you open the dusty blinds and fixate on the hawthorn tree with its tips reaching your window. The red berries you have tasted every bloom are frozen, the branches are coated with a soft layer of snow, and you think that maybe this is the day. A flimsy jacket over your thin white shirt and a pair of jeans take you outside – your cotton flats make no crunching sounds as you go out and leave a small trail of silent footsteps on your way to the hawthorn tree. Your head is angled up, your mouth, open in an invitation that gets rejected continuously. You never got along with snowflakes. When you reach the tree, you pop a frozen haw berry in your mouth and lie down under the tree where the leaves are thick. You can never fully trust a half evergreen. You watch the sky through the little cracks, and as the berry leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth, you realize that you don’t know where the sky ends and where the rest of the universe starts. You close your eyelids, and wait, because the snowflakes that will reluctantly land on them will numb your whole body. Breathe in, you’ll never know when you are cold, just trust the snow and the soil to do their work. They will clean you of your sins, take you apart, and give you a new beginning. Yes, you want that. Breathe. Time passes rather quickly. It’s 11 at night and the dim streetlight is giving the snow a yellow tint. You smile. The icicles under your fingertips will disintegrate you and the earth will take you in, and you finally understand why the berries taste bitter – they are filled with sins.