Snowfall on the Things We Should’ve Said
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There’s a quiet that comes with winter—
the kind that settles on the ribcage
like freshly fallen snow,
soft enough to look harmless,
heavy enough to reshape the whole landscape.
That’s where I find us now:
in the blank, white hush
of everything we never said.
I still think about the words
we left unspoken,
the ones that hovered between us
like breath on a cold window—
there for a moment,
then gone,
leaving nothing but a smudge
where the truth should have been.
Some nights I imagine
what would have happened
if we’d actually said them—
if we’d let our confessions
spill warm and trembling
into the air between us,
instead of tucking them away
like unsent letters
in a drawer neither of us opens anymore.
Regret is its own kind of winter.
It freezes time,
crystallizes memories
into something too delicate to touch
and too painful to look away from.
I see us standing in that snowdrift—
two silhouettes blurred by distance,
both of us pretending
we’re not shivering.
There were so many chances.
So many almosts.
So many evenings
when the words perched on my lips
like sparrows waiting for the courage to fly.
But silence felt safer,
even as it chipped away at us
bit by bit,
like frost creeping across a pane of glass
we swore we’d never let break.
And now,
the past feels like a field after snowfall—
untouched,
unfixable,
cold in all the places
where warmth once lived.
Still,
I find myself returning there
with mittened hands
and a foolish heart,
brushing snow from the pieces
of a conversation we never finished,
wondering who we’d be
if we’d spoken the truth
before winter came.
Because some loves
don’t end—
they just freeze.
And some regrets
fall year after year,
quiet as snowfall,
soft as sorrow,
covering everything
we should have said
in white.
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