The ice is screaming against the iron walls outside but I am only listening to the steady, heavy rhythm of your breath as you fight with a world that has already given up, watching your fingers go numb against the frozen bolts and knowing that we have stood in the ruins of a thousand collapsing empires before this one. We wear these bodies like heavy, winter coats that we will eventually cast aside, yet we treat this single, freezing room like it is the edge of existence when it is really just a brief pitstop on a journey that started before light had a name. I know the isolation feels like a physical weight crushing your chest, I know the rust on your palms makes you feel fragile and mortal, but that is the trick of this dying place, it wants you to forget the absolute expanse of what we are. If you could see yourself through my eyes you would see a cosmic silhouette cutting through the blizzard, an unblockable force that has crossed galaxies just to sit in the dirt with me one more time, so let the engines fail and let the grid go black because our warmth was never dependent on a sun or a machine. Trust the quiet gravity pulling at the center of your chest, let the armor of your doubt crack open and fall away into the frost, leaving us perfectly exposed and perfectly safe in the middle of the wreckage. The tool slips from your hand and hits the concrete with a dull, final thud, the silence rushing in to fill the space where the noise of survival used to be, and as you slowly lift your head, wiping the grime from your brow to look at me, the ancient recognition flashes in your eyes like lightning in a dark sky, proving that no matter how deep the winter gets, we are the one thing that cannot be frozen out.
