Arctic Body.

Voices fracture into faces as memory freezes over—

people replaced by glaciers that move slower but cut deeper.

I lower myself into the Arctic and pray I remember how to swim in something that does not want me alive. 

Cold has always been honest,

it does not pretend to hold you while plotting your disappearance.

It does not whisper love with teeth behind its tongue.

It simply takes—heat, breath,

movement—until you learn what survival actually costs. 

They say the ice is melting,

but no one talks about how fast a person can freeze when left alone inside themselves.

I have been both—

the collapse and the witness, 

the fracture and the flood.

Still...

beneath all this frozen language, there is something moving;

a current, 

a pulse,

proof that even here,

in the most inhospitable version of me,

I have not stopped trying to live.