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12. Disappear

Reading a superb book called Snow by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk made me think a lot about all these things. Most especially about the value of silence as an artistic act, which for a writer, I guess, is the equivalent to either white noise or the space just after a song has finished.

The book also made me think about the times I had seen snow in my own life…Vomiting, on a school excursion, my head out the window of our bus as it moved through the dark of night, drunk and shivering with the icy wind in my ears. In the Himalayas, at Thorung La pass, the highest point on the planet that a man can reach unaided and on foot, the thinness of the oxygen moving me to some delirious happiness, skipping where only minutes before I thought I would never make another step. And last in Millthorpe, population 650, a country Australian town, walking on a deserted road, the snow flakes falling thick, and as I look into them now and imagine how I saw them, with all the density of a sound, like very sweet locusts, except there was no sound, only a quiet, perhaps the crunch of my boots and my breathing in clouds, tasting one single flake of ice on my tongue and thinking of the sky it came from.

I mean, this story has twelve points to it, just like every snowflake has. An idea I stole from Orhan Pamuk’s wonderful book. I hope it dissolves on your tongue as easily. I hope you make a wish as it does. Let’s disappear.