Signs of Life

I met an Asian woman here in Finland in January. She said that it seems like everything is dead around here. ‘No wonder’, I thought, but went looking for signs of life.

On the first day I left it too late. It was dark. I looked right and there were only the stars and the moon, each blinking away like it was a competition. I looked left and there was the creek, glistening ice in the moonlight, and heaps of snow, in the bleached landscape. I reached for my torch and turned back, darkness creeping at my heels.

On the second day it was whiter than white. It was so white that even the sounds had turned white. I tried if my ears worked, tapped on them with my hands. All I heard was the thump of my mittens. I coughed and I couldn’t hear the echo. For a while I stood there and followed the huge snowflakes landing on the ground softly, smoothly. There was no one in sight. Some odd branches were slowly being buried in white silence, one puff at a time. ‘Tough luck’, I thought.

On the third day I ventured out even though there was less chance of anything else than mere splat. I climbed up a hill to witness the state of things and it really wasn’t worth it. I sat at the top and saw a cat. ‘Funny’, I thought, ‘I might stay inside if I were a cat’. No signs of life that day either (despite the cat). Just quite a drench. So I thought, ‘Let’s leave it at that’.