Breaking Things

As I'm walked through the snow this morning before my cousin rescued me, and after I arrived back in my neighborhood this afternoon and walked across the courtyard, I was struck by the inexplicable beauty of untouched snow: glistening, smooth and white and cold on the ground, sunlight glittering through the frozen flakes all clumped together.

This winter, the first real winter I've experienced in twelve years, I was constantly struck by how such a simple thing, such a beautiful and straightforward thing, could appear in so many different ways. Sometimes, the flakes are so small and fall so fast, they're like tiny bullets fired into the ground, and they melt as soon as they touch down. Sometimes, they fall slow and steady, laying on the ground like a blanket pulled meticulously over someone you love when they fell asleep on the couch late at night. Once, the snow fell so hard and so fast the flakes clung to each other as they came down, and as we drove home through that particular deluge, thumbnail-sized clumps of snowflakes hit the windows of the car and were so large they took fifteen seconds to melt from the heat preserved in the car by the heater and two people breathing. When I looked out the window at the aftermath the next day, it had the texture of grated Parmesan cheese when you accidentally pour too much on your pasta too quickly and just have this massive pock-marked thing on top of your food.

Yesterday, I didn't watch it fall, but the courtyard in front of my building had waves of snow lying across it, like the sand at the bottom of the shallow part of a river. It was breathtaking.

I broke it.

I stepped on it as hard as I could and crunched through all the beautiful, untouched patches of snow I could crunch through from the street to my front door. I stomped on it and squashed it and left foot-trails of slush in my wake and the slush didn't catch the sunlight nearly as well as the untouched, virgin-pure snow of the morning.

Everywhere I stepped, it crunched satisfyingly beneath my feet before giving way to the weight of my foot and collapsing all the way to the frozen dead grass beneath. Every step I took left a hollow print, like a dent in a car door, and filled with slush and mud and ugly.  Every time I stomped my foot down in the gleaming-bright snow and broke the beautiful surface, I smiled.

I think I must be ill. I take great pleasure in breaking beautiful things, and I really can't remember a time in which I didn't.

Quick! Someone with a background in Psychology! Tell me how breaking things means I'm broken? Because I only break the pretty things; I walked the long way around all the muddy dirty snow piles shoveled to the curb from the street. I didn't step within five feet of the exposed sidewalk, or any other sets of footprints. Logically, it makes more sense to break broken things because why leave a job unfinished? They're already so damaged a little more scarring won't hurt.

But I have an affinity for breaking pretty things.

Why only walk in the untouched snow?

I've burst into tears no fewer than fifteen times since Monday. My eyes feel scratchy and swollen. But stomping through the clean snow? That made me smile. Those particular tears were joyful.

I must be sick.