Cold

I wish I could find right words to explain what this kind of cold is like. No one seems to understand it when I try to regurgitate this feeling. It is the type of chill that creeps up on you when you least expect it to. It arrests your senses and leaves you hyperventilating. The chill has somehow snuck beneath your delicate skin and is getting increasingly colder inside you. It engulfs your frame in every imaginable way, and sends that indescribable chill shooting down your spine when you breathe. 

I wish I could put it down in words, to explain what this cold really is.

It isn’t an externally inflicted sort of cold. It is the type of cold that gets into your bones, the one that chatters your soul and gets your adrenaline rushing. It seeps into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, wrecking your ribs and chilling every inch of you. 

And you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can’t ignore it anymore. Your thoughts become magnified, clearer than it has ever been. Clearer than it will ever be. You feel like an ice cube. You feel like you’re naked and have fallen through thin ice on a lake and are drowning in the ice water underneath. You can’t breathe. 

Most importantly, the cold changes perspective in life. Somehow, it makes you see and value warmth differently from everyone who crosses your path. It makes you grow by the tenfold.

Paraphrased from Marya Hornbacher, Wasted
Dress c/o Wonderstellar
Photos // Kanny Theng