It was the 31st.

    

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The view was reassuring, giving the promise that night would never come to dominate; darkness would never descend. Only wooden cabinets could be distinguished in the whiteness with little sparkles of light infiltrating the small square windows, indicating the presence of life, and with their roofs bearing the heavy layered snow. As the melting snow froze again immediately, it formed icicles of two to three meters, getting closer to touching the snow on the ground with every drop of water that turned into ice. The icicles made it seem like the winter had sharp teeth despite its protective and cozy appearance. 

    

From the attic’s window, everything seemed like a lucid dream that would fade away once the morning came. The snowflakes were piercing through the sky, performing a display of beauty and perfection, dancing in harmony and with a different flow each time the wind tickled them. One would never want to fall asleep at that moment, one would never want to leave and would stay there as long as the winter lasted. But my eyelids failed me, getting heavier each second until I could resist no more, until I fell asleep quietly, peacefully, fancying.

I woke up to an endless kingdom of purity. It was so white that the brightness blinded me for a couple of seconds before I could readjust my eyesight. I never knew that the world could be so pure, so bright, and so flawless. One would be convinced that the snowfall would never end, that it would snow till the end of the world.

    

Even the streetlights were shivering, one could tell. They seemed as if they had bent their heads because they couldn’t endure the heavy snow piling up on top of them. It had coated all over the frozen lake across my room, forming tiny pathways of human traces that looked like spoors of fox or lynx from up here. It had coated over all that is ominous and fearsome, all that the night recalled. It brought safety. I was surrounded by a sea of snow; infinite and so perfect that it gave the impression that one could simply jump into it and disappear and float in it forever.

    

It was a new day, a new year, a new beginning. A reason to start over with a new slate as clean and as white as the snow. As pure as the snow.

I had woken up to paradise.