Snow was bright and glittery when the disco black lights hit her. An ice queen melting on the dance floor; sometimes she’d start partying too early in the day and wilt into your arms by midnight. Carrying her out of a club, you couldn’t help noticing how classically beautiful she was, like a figure on an ancient urn, straight nose, monochrome, unblemished. The hard nightlife hadn’t yet extracted its tax on her looks. Her demeanor was resilient as well, more fiercely bubbly than champagne, her laugh more a guffaw than a giggle.

She lasted a long time in that state, in that life, before the reckoning tumbled in with the winds of changing weather. All those heartbreaks; the overdoses and other episodes of violence, the AIDS and other scourges that she somehow escaped but sat sat witness to, like an empath, as was just – her whole life was that life, those people, her crowd, now falling apart, unlike her.

I saw her soul hollowing, and didn’t want to see her ever again. I dreaded the thought of time changing her. I remain with the memory of Snow, undrifted.

-Danny Grosso