Notes: The title belongs to Bob Seger
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These days, the thing that captures your attention about the snow is the darkness between the flakes.
He watched you that night, as you stood there in the middle of the road with the streetlamps reflecting in your eyes and your arms outstretched as if to catch the moment and keep it forever, for just the two of you. It was in that moment that winter became a time of renewal for you, and the irony of it didn�t start to bother you until it was too late.
That night, as the world lay dying around you, the two of you came to life.
You wondered for a split second what kind of man he saw when he looked at you, because there was an awe in his eyes that startled you. But then you decided it didn�t matter, because you were both young and brilliant, and you were thousands of miles from home. So you grinned at him as you watched the flakes tumble into his hair, and you silently envied his Connecticut blood. He stood there with his scarf draped loosely around his neck and his coat flapping open in the breeze while you shivered, wrapped in layers of cloth.
You spun slowly around in the middle of the deserted street, and he laughed because you were a child to him, with wide blue eyes and impossibly long eyelashes that caught the snowflakes as they fell around you. And you laughed at him too, because there was a delight in his eyes that had awakened in the days you had known him, and you saw that there was a child in those eyes too.
The laughter made you forget to miss California.
He came to you then, and together you stood silently and watched the world fade around you. He reached for your hand and you let him take it, feeling the warmth of his skin through your gloves. It stole some of the chill from your bones and sent a different kind of shiver down your back. You didn�t think he noticed, and you were glad, because it wasn�t something you wanted to explain. Instead you stood in silence with him and realized that it was practically the first moment you had shared that required no words.
You had met in a coffee shop because you spilled coffee on him, and something in his reassuring smile had kept you from fleeing in embarrassment. He had pushed out the chair across from him with his foot, and you�d accepted the unspoken invitation because you knew no one in this city, and you felt that you owed him. Conversation had come easily, because he was a man of many words, and hours had passed before either of you discovered that your coffees had grown cold and the sun had set on the busy street outside.
You had exchanged phone numbers with him because it seemed the polite thing to do, and he left you there on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop with a distant smile on your face. You watched him leave, crossing in front of oncoming cars because that was how things were done in this city, his scarf flapping behind him in the winter wind, and you knew you wouldn�t see him again.
The next day he had called, just to prove you wrong, and you met him in Chinatown for dinner. Somewhere between the appetizers and the bubble teas that you sipped as you made your way back to the subway, you discovered that you were no longer alone on this coast.
Days had passed, and you had continued with the internship your father had set up for you, but the work was no longer your priority, no longer the reason you were in this city. When the work was done, he was there, and suddenly home was beginning to mean something other than the state you had been raised in. It scared you, because he had become your default, your center.
So that night you stood with him in the snow and you watched it for the first time, feeling the chill of the flakes on your cheeks contrasting with the warmth of his hand in yours. When you turned to meet his warm brown eyes, you found that they were full of something that reflected the wonder in your own eyes, but it was a wonder that was not for the snow. It was for you.
You were caught in the brightness of the moment, the brilliant white of the snow that dusted the road beneath your feet and gathered in the curls of his hair, the flickering streetlamps overhead and the stars above them, lighting his eyes with a dazzling spark. You leaned forward to brush your lips against his, and then the brightness was between you and within you, and it was you, both of you, alone together in a silent winter.
But now, after all these years, when you see the snow, you see not the brilliance of the flakes but the gaping blankness between them, in the spaces he has left hollow.
Winter is no longer your refuge.
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It was in the spring that you nearly lost him.
The years had failed you both, and though you could see him, and talk to him, and every so often touch him, there was a distance between you, a hurt that could not be healed by either proximity or separation. It had been your own fear that had driven the wall between you, and there was a guilt that haunted your every glimpse of him. There were nights when you would look up from your desk to see him leaning there in the doorway with that sad smile in his eyes that spoke to you of memories and longing, and you knew that there were times when he saw the same in you.
But the time was all wrong, and there was more to lose now, so it all went unspoken.
Then the bullets were fired, and it changed everything and nothing all at once.
You were not the one who found him, and that realization was what woke you in the nights. The dreams haunted you, dreams of him lying there against the cold cement, slowly bleeding, while you stood at a distance and watched but didn�t move, didn�t call for help, just watched as the light slowly dimmed from his eyes. You knew that you should feel grateful for Toby, be glad that he had been there for him, but it had been your hand he had grasped at in the endless ride to the hospital, and your name he had whispered through cracked lips when he woke. And you had not been there in the moment when he needed you most.
You slept by his bedside those nights in the hospital, when he would wake up gasping in wordless pain. You would smooth back his hair that was soaked with sweat, and you would let him clutch at your hand until the knuckles cracked and red welts were worn into your skin, but you knew all the while that none of it helped. Work was a blur to you, but you were needed, so you went, and you filled the hours until you could come back to collapse into the hard hospital chair by his side and bury your head in your arms on the edge of his bed.
Donna was there in the hours when you weren�t, and you tried to be thankful that he was not alone, but she looked at him with eyes you recognized from the mirror, and you were always glad when she was gone and you were alone with him. You would talk to him, mindless chatter, and sometimes he would have the strength to reply. When he didn�t, you would read to him, occasionally the paper if he insisted, more often one of the books you had brought from his apartment. Some nights you would sit in silence together, and you would open the window and breathe in the scent of new flowers on the breeze.
Your life with him had always seemed at odds with the world around you, and those days were no exception. As the world bloomed and reawakened after the winter, the two of you sat stagnant in a hospital room, surrounded by the sterile smells of illness and pain and the brutal silence of healing.
Things were better when he moved back home, but only marginally. You began the first few nights on the couch, but you would wake each morning holding him in your arms, the dried tracks of his nightmare tears still streaking his cheeks. Eventually it just made more sense for you to crawl into bed with him when you finally got back from the office, and he slept better with you there anyway.
They were hard nights for you, terrible nights, because each one would begin and end with him sleeping peacefully, but in the middle there would be the screams and the tears and his desperate voice calling out your name, not feeling your arms around him at all.
You never told him, but even now you still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, dreaming of those nights.
The months passed and his scars began to heal. Then came one night when he didn�t wake calling for you, and you woke up anyways and sat in bed for hours watching him sleep, waiting for it to come. It never did, and when the sun rose the next morning you finally began to believe that he was getting better.
As spring passed into summer and summer moved towards fall, he began to need you less and less.
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You watched the leaves outside your window turn from green to gold and finally drift away in the wind as you packed your things to leave him.
He still talked like you would return, they all did, but you knew that you wouldn�t, not even if you lost the election, which you knew was inevitable. You were flying out there to fight a losing battle, the kind that you had been fighting together since you had met, but this time you were preparing to do it alone. You didn�t ask him to come with you, and he didn�t offer, because he knew in a part of him that he refused to acknowledge that you didn�t want him to, not really.
Something had died between you in those years, something you couldn�t name but you knew was vital and irreplaceable.
There was a numb shock in his eyes that night, when he discovered what you had done, and it hurt you to see it there, because they were eyes that had once trusted you and never would again.
You had never been the kind of man who ran from people, not really, but he had made you that man when he came to find you in New York. You ran from Lisa without a backward glance, and now you did the same to him because you didn�t know how else to change things between you. California became your refuge, and the campaign was your escape, while across the country he remained trapped in the life you had left behind for him.
Things had changed in the years you had been gone, and you discovered as soon as you stepped off the plane that California was no longer your home. Home had been with him, even if you hadn�t realized it, and you found that you were a stranger here in your own neighborhood. You didn�t miss him because you didn�t let yourself, but in the dark hours of the night as you lay awake in bed listening to the wind rattle your windows, you discovered that you were homesick, not for a place, but for a time.
They visited, all of them, and you found that you couldn�t avoid him because just seeing him from across the room made your breath catch in your throat, and you knew then that you hadn�t left him, not really. You had left that city and that existence, but he was so much a part of you that he was inescapable. He found you on the beach that night, because it was where you went to think, and he knew that about you just like he knew everything else. You sat there together in silence and watched the waves crash onto the shore, and you lay your head in his lap and let him run his fingers through your hair while you cried. You didn�t know if they were tears of frustration or defeat or something else entirely, but it didn�t seem to matter to him, because he kissed them away and led you back to the hotel without a word. He held you in his arms as you counted the stars outside his window and slowly drifted off to sleep.
You woke in the morning to discover that nothing had been mended between you, but that you were content with this broken relationship. You asked him to stay, even though you knew he wouldn�t, and he asked you to come home, even though he knew you couldn�t let yourself, and then he boarded the plane with nothing but a long backwards look and the whispered promise of �this isn�t the end.�
The plane took off into a sunny afternoon from a runway lined with palm trees, and you found yourself longing to be somewhere where you could stand together and watch the autumn wind carry swirls of color across the tarmac.
Instead you stood alone in an air conditioned building, touched a single finger to the cold glass of the window that separated you from him, and whispered a goodbye that he was never meant to hear.
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He left you in the humid darkness of a summer night.
Defeat had broken him, and he was no longer the man you had fallen in love with all those years ago on a deserted street in Boston. There were still times when you could see a tiny spark of the life that had danced in his eyes that night as he watched you twirling in the snow, but those times had become too precious, too rare.
He needed you too much now, and he hated himself for it.
You had been with him on election night, and in the shadows you had held his hand as the results were called. You tried to remind him that he had stood by you through a losing campaign, but you both knew that it was not the same, because he had thrown his heart and soul and life into getting this man into office, and he had failed. You had laughed at him in the beginning of the campaign, and he had laughed with you, because you both knew that he was trying to be Leo to this man.
But by losing he had disappointed both of them, Leo and Santos, and himself besides.
Nothing he did could ever disappoint you, of course, but that wasn�t enough for him and you knew it, so you didn�t say the words, just watched in silence as he raged in the confines of an impersonal hotel room, and then held him when the fury subsided and the tears came.
Washington was no longer his home, merely the site of his failure, so he had returned to California with you, and as time passed, it had begun to feel like home again.
�I miss the seasons,� he told you one night, and maybe you should have recognized it as the beginning of the end. You didn�t know what he meant, not really, but he had gone on to explain, and his words had reminded you that he was a New England boy, and he had grown up measuring time by falling leaves and snowfall, budding trees and blistering heat. Things were different here, less severe, and it was a difference between you, not just in climates, but in personalities.
You would catch him looking at you some nights, when you would sit out on the porch and listen to the waves crash on the shore, and you would see in his eyes that you were all he had left, and it scared him.
There was no reason for you to wake that night, because you didn�t feel him moving from the bed, didn�t hear the drawers creak as he opened and closed them, didn�t hear the door close behind him. But something woke you, something in the silence of the room, and you discovered that his place beside you was empty and cold. A fear gripped you then, because you understood even before you slipped from between the sheets that he was gone.
You found him on the beach behind the house, his suitcase propped against his leg as he stood staring out at the ocean. There were tears in his eyes as he turned to see you standing there in the moonlight, but they didn�t fall. Instead he gave you the saddest smile you had ever seen, and it broke your heart because you knew it meant goodbye.
It wasn�t pride that kept you from begging him to stay, but an understanding of who he was, so you went to him and wrapped your arms around his neck, not in supplication but in farewell. His fingers slid through your hair as your tears fell on his shoulder, and when you raised your head, his lips brushed yours in a kiss tinged with finality.
You watched him walk away from you, leaving behind footprints on the sand and your life as he went.
You sank to the ground and wrapped your arms around your knees, but you didn�t cry, not then, because your tears had been spent. You sat there alone as the hours passed around you, and as the sun rose you laughed bitterly to yourself, because once again a beginning in the world around you meant an ending to the two of you.
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That winter, you went alone to the mountains, and sat on the porch in the darkness and watched the snow dance under the light because winter was your time to think of him. You remembered him that night, so many years ago, when the wind caught the snowflakes around him and sent them spinning into his hair and his sparkling eyes. To you, he was the light, the white of the snowflakes, the warmth of a hand in yours as the world froze around you.
So you focused on the darkness, on the spaces between the flakes, because that was what he had left you with.
And these days, that is what you see when you look out your window into the snow.
You see him in the flakes�and yourself in the darkness between.