The Tempest's Fade

12/27/2025

A swirling, icy mist descended. Not suddenly, as one might have preferred in a more aware retrospective state, but at its own pace and intensity.

Blue like frozen lips. Cold like libertarian logic. Blinding like a gaze directed at a peaked eclipse. Harrowing like a long, lightless highway at the dead of night, driven without company or conviction.

It swirled and screamed and surrounded me, blocking the warmth from the many stars above. It beat the very images of my siblings out of my cold-cracked memory, their faces and mannerisms, known to the same level of detail as a historian’s telling of an esoteric battle from an esoteric part of history no one cared to inspect but she, now hazy and foreign.

In that storm I lost them. And I lost myself.

Wandering alone, unclothed and unwanted, eyes frozen shut, I tried to find them. The storm understood this and rebelled, wailing as it careened into every part of my mind that had even the slightest connection to them.

For a brief moment I resisted, but this storm was mine, and it anticipated perfectly, thickening at those neural intersections I needed most to remember the difference between real and imaginary.

It was my tempest, my subconscious cyclone. My mind’s creative solution to the loss of that fire we all have within. A cold, numbing response to the pain bursting forth from deep within.

And its price - temporarily - was the memories of those three beautiful souls I so dearly loved.

It took away from me the faces of my brothers and sister, like a mythological beast kidnapping the children of a goddess, whisking them away to his dark depths, goading their mother to rescue her at risk of annihilation.

It made me forget my siblings’ faces, and I believed it to be true just long enough to feel my heart dim. I gave it free reign to whip its icy winds through the channels of my mind, coating each road and node and bridge with a slippery layer of cold steel fear, challenging me to walk those newly updated paths alone, without skates or winter coat or compass.

The tempest took me into its cocoon, and wrapped me so tightly I lost my breath and began to fade. And as I faded, the thing I loved most about this life faded with me.