Her dad gave her the bowl of raspberries at the most inopportune time. Holding her phone craned against her shoulder, she weakly smiled her thanks, shut the door, and immediately thrust the bowl onto her desk. She had no use for it at this time.

She crawled back into her bed, a temporary haven of warmth. Wetness, on the brink of evaporation and yet still discernibly uncomfortable, lined her deflated pillows; the walls of her house were thin.

“Hello? I’m sorry,” she croaked, tears resuming. She berated herself for her weakness, her idiocy to let trivial matters in the long run to affect her to this degree. Nevertheless, she clung onto the phone tighter, seeking any source of comfort.

“Hey,” her friend whispered back. Together, they spoke of things unspoken, things that only trailed out of the human heart when it is ripped apart. They spoke to the tune of sporadic message sounds from her computer, tinted with worry from her absence. She found them later on, and was thankful for the concern.

In a sudden rage, she called his number, once, twice, and a third time. What had she done to deserve such tactlessness? Could her self-esteem be any lower? Each time, she was redirected to his voicemail, spitting out his impossibly polite tone that did not match his actions. Tempted, she was, to scream into her phone, accusing him of the suffering and torment that had plagued her for the past two months, exacerbated today into an unbearable sickness. But, she could not bring herself to wreck the already broken glass flask that she had been carefully mending.

Blackness deepened, the moon obfuscated by sunken clouds. If someone had walked down her street at this hour of the night, though, they would have noticed a bright point of yellow light emitting from a single source amidst the quietly slumbering world. She had left her lights on through the night. She could not bear the darkness alone; she could not bear to dream.

Like a small, immature child, she cried herself to sleep. The child did not understand why le felt such pain from a silently bleeding scratch, and neither did she.

So, she was surprised when she woke up to snow. Shivering from the outside cold and the coldness from elsewhere, she tentatively ambled to her window, peeking out from behind the blinds. There was something so magical and sad about it, her torn feelings bracing themselves to accept change, ushered on by the shift of seasons.

Prompted by an unimaginable force, she grabbed the sickening-sweet bowl of raspberries that she had left lingering on her desk. The aroma had filled the room, permeating her mind too with a sanguine mood she could no longer accompany. In gasping breaths, she dashed outside and staggered as the full brunt of the temperature enveloped her. She shivered in her camisole and thin pajama pants, and sighed as the wind blew flurries around her face.

Carefully, tenderly, she poured the contents of the bowl into the ground, staring as the scarlet red juice bled into the fresh white snow.