Still, unimaginable horror.  Black like ink poured over the world.

“It’s called night,” we once said to her.

We hadn’t the heart to tell her she was blind.

When she ran headlong into a wall, we’d offer, “It might be a wall, Sweetie.  See if you can feel your way around.”

We knew it was a wall.  We were staring right at it.

Crystal blue eyes like magic water.  How could such beautiful things shroud their owner in perpetual darkness?  What a cruel dichotomy.

The stillness settles around me now, cold and featureless.  Winter sky.  No clouds.  No wind.  Just cold and dark.  Even the stars twinkle with chills.

But she had loved the cold.  Never once did she see the change it brought to the land.  Not one autumn did she fill those blue eyes with the sight of leaves changing colors, blowing on the wind in a dance of rainbows, leaving the trees in a mass exodus and exposing the bones of the world.

How she loved winter, though, and without seeing a bit of it.

She could taste snow on the air, smell it long before the first flake tumbled from the sky.

She adored the feel of it against her flesh.  Wet and icy, the frozen trails it painted on her cheeks are still fresh in my mind today.

And her nose.  Ah, she could wear snow on her nose and make it a fashion statement, one she alone could make work.

Even as we slipped along carefully maneuvering over ice and deep drifts, she plunged headlong into the whole of it, a dark figure lost against a white backdrop of forever.

“I love how it feels when it gets between my toes.”

I’ve never met another who feels the same way.

My feet move carefully as my hands flail in the blackness.  A lightless room with no walls.  A cell that eats vision and gives nothing in return.  And it goes on and on.

Had she felt like this?  Ever?

When finally a crescent moon leaps from behind a canopy of naked limbs, the water stretches out before me, a liquid carpet framed with ice that brings together the land and the sea with a touch of both.

Her vision waltzes on the pier.  A ghostly apparition made of memory and regret.

Things can never be that way again, I tell myself quietly.

The words stab at me with heartache.  We had said the same thing to her as she slipped away from us.

First went her balance.  We had to carry her up and down the steps to keep her from falling from the back porch.  Pitiful, meek agony kept silent.  She never complained.

“Things can never be that way again,” we’d tell her when she asked why play had become so dangerous, why jaunting about in sunshine she couldn’t see threatened her as it had never done before.

She didn’t understand our answer.  Then again, she understood so little by then.

Second went her mind.  Eating and drinking, simple tasks the both of them, became forgotten memories, strange activities for strange beings.  Just not her.

I walk toward the water’s edge, toward the dock.  I can’t take my eyes off her specter.  She dances for me, calls to me.

Night presses in on all sides.  Cold night.  My breath freezes to my lips.  They undoubtedly are as blue as her eyes used to be.

I keep walking.

When she wanted to stand in those final years, we held her up, a living puppet made of flesh that barely kept itself alive.

And we would carry her out into the snow, hold her upright and walk her along so she could feel it between her toes.  We would hold her head so she could face the barren clouds.  From that gray infinity stretching from horizon to horizon she would feast upon the smell of the coming snow.  She didn’t remember why it was important, at least by then, but she knew it was important nonetheless.

My feet slide on the wooden planks.  Ice sparkles like diamonds, sheets of it stretched like nature’s jewelry upon each board.  Be careful that you don’t slip into the water.  I ignore the voice now.  It’s too late for advice.

Last went her life.  In the darkness she had always known, in that place where nothing could be seen and where she lived her whole existence, we knew she couldn’t see how thin she had become, how her once beautiful hair had fallen out in thick patches.

Snow between her toes.  The thought crossed my mind as we said goodbye, as my own tears drew icy tendrils down my cheeks.

If she was to know nothing else, let her last experience be the cold she so loved.

I reach the end of the pier and carefully settle on its edge.  My toes dangle absently in the murky water, its frigid embrace unknown to my mind.

Her dance has carried her out over the lake’s surface.  Her feet barely touch it as her hands stretch out and wave through the night.  I know such things are not possible, yet I watch her anyway, feast my eyes upon that which is so painfully missed.

“I love you,” I whisper.  “You look beautiful tonight.”

“I love you, too.  Won’t you join me?”

So I move my last, a simple gesture that slides me from the pier and into the chilly depths to which we lost her.

My breath is wrested from me, locked from my chest by the weight of freezing water.  Still I go to her.

As I slip beneath the surface, I feel her hand take mine.  Her stunning blue eyes look at me, and I realize for the first time ever that she sees me.

We embrace as the night settles upon us for the last time.

Now I understand her world.