Writing Ghost Stories during a White-Out
The world was a ghost of itself that day. The trees were ghosts. The building across the way was ghostly through the snow.
I spent it mostly in my chair by the window, looking out of it from time to time, wondering how much paler the world could get.
The stuff came down thick as cotton, like fluffy rabbit tails, getting caught on everything it happened to touch. The tree outside my window was laden with fluff. The cars out-front disappeared under it, frosted over into hibernation. It filled up the world, disguising the town around me.
You forget you live in a town on those days. No cars come by. No people wander out their doors. Paths and roads get lost on those days, and all the town's people go missing under the weight of snowed in rooftops. We all live under ground on those days, like happy moles, the world and the wind barely remembered.
I watched as the wind pack snow onto my windows all throughout the day. It was the most literal snowing-in I could imagine, and it thrilled me. I could faintly see the tree that stands just outside, bare limbs scratching, waving lonesomely.
It
thrilled me because I thought my chances were higher this time than the
time the streets flooded whilst I stayed home and edited my book. This
time wind and sky and snow were banning together, I thought, to build a
snow-fort around me. In the morning, all I'd see is the close winter,
pressed against the glass of every window, refusing to let me out,
letting little in besides a faint impression of light, weakly melting.
I
would not complain, not about the mountain on my front steps, too much
for one shovel to muster; I would not mind about the car which has gone
missing somewhere in a driveway which has equally disappeared.
We can go dig out the world later.
I
can go anywhere on the white page. And, though the white winter world
is gone and distant, the ghosts on the page are more tangible than the
cold seeping through the glass, just so long as the storm lasts.
Still, my windows were only partly covered when the dark settled in, as it
comes in winter, somehow softly, touching everything evenly. You look
away, and then the day is over, and you bring out the candles and pretend
the night will last forever so that the snowday does not end.
A lifetime of snowdays should me enough for me, I think. Books depend on snowdays, after all.
In the meantime, I
will sit here in my snowfort through the school days and the times when
cafes close. They will start to wonder where I went. They will forget
where the front door is.
But
sometimes in the dark a wanderer will dare the winter, and if
they come by the snowfort which has a house under it, and maybe a lonely
tree, they might see a light glowing faintly from somewhere under the
snow and they will know someone is still in
there and that they have not run out of candles. They will know someone
inside is still awake, writing in secret.
For now, I would like the time to edit. I would like the days to fill themselves with winter, so I can stay snowed in. I would like to stay in my snowfort, safely forgetting that I live in a town, and not inside a book.