Back then it wasn’t like this. Back then I didn’t feel the bite of this harsh wind, I didn’t have the urge to be outside, to feel the cold at all my edges and return, flooded by the warmth of the lounge.

Back then I didn’t feel anything.

Back then, there’d been no snow, not for months at least and the last time the snow had fallen we were soft, we were round and plump and full of beans but that was then. Then, when winter came it was just a season, it was something to note and to turn from. But then it changed.

Sometime back then it stopped becoming only a season, a front of weather and nothing more. Back then it stopped. Abrupt. Savaged and severed and when I woke all the weather had gone. Back then and not now where weather used to live, there was my soul. There was a shifting churning swathe of everything I felt. No one knew of course, it was a passing storm for them, a raincloud in their day but for me it was an extension of my mind.

I don’t remember what others call weather back then, I just know it didn’t snow. I didn’t wear a coat but then again temperatures were irrelevant to me, external events were just that. There was outside of me where the others lived but they were absent, distant beings who orbited my world and there was me.

I became everything, every atom that existed, every colour, taste and sound and there on that day back then, that isn’t this snow threatened day right now, back then when what others referred to as the weather came, I was oblivious. I was turning, breathing, pulsing through my land – but nothing more.

I remember black, shapes of people, blurring. Some chrome catching light from a fusion reaction and my hands.  I remember my hands, I think. Small and pale at the ends of my arms. My top was long and flowed around what was left of my form and there were faces.

Faces came close, came and went or rushed away. Perfume seeped around me, unknown aftershave and the pressure of a hug. I could smell their hair as they leaned into me, strangers. Why were there so many strangers and their mouths moved and they said words but nothing I could hear.

I was there, so others told me and I moved amongst them, through them down an aisle we’d visited long ago. Long before I changed shape, long-time-hours before that day. And in that place that we used to know, we didn’t see that I would be there, that I would sit at the front and look up.

I’d sit up straight, too straight, as though my life depended on it and it did and I’d stare out of my body, up and away through the coloured window to the hills we used to walk – but no one knew.

They passed through while I stopped and altered, while I morphed into someone else and back then, it didn’t snow. There was no bite to my hands and nose, no sense to wrap up warm, there was just the day, the place, the minutes rolling, hours and the hardness of the seat.

This seat is hard now but I am home. I am not there and I watch the robin watching me. His birdbath has frozen again, despite the top up of luke warm water. A snowstorm is heading in. I remember a time when I used to react to the weather, when it lived outside of my form and then I changed. Back then, in that minute when there ceased to be any separation between me and this world.

I became the weather and now I blow. I move and change, a constant swirl of shifting energy and now I’m winter, now I’m frost. Everything is an extension of me and here comes snow. I am gentle and white, I make you stop and take note.

I sit down and watch myself. Back then it didn’t snow. Sun came through the windows, probably and I breathed and that was all.

And now I sit and watch my changing feelings. I expand and fill. Back then for a while there was weather but not now, now I am this white out winter world.

I am my snow.