Page 164 of Sweet Nightmare

A winter night like this one. Freezing air against my cheeks. Skates beneath my feet.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Especially the feeling of freedom these skates give me.

You see…the world has always felt too loud and too confusing to me. People expected smiles I didn’t know how to give. Excitement I didn’t know how to show. Emotions I couldn’t always translate into words.

But the ice? The ice asks nothing of me.

That night many years ago I found a piece of the puzzle that I am. I fell in love that night with the feeling of flying on ice.

And then another memory follows that one and I can’t stop it. It’s a memory I’ve kept locked behind ice. The one that has always seemed strangely connected to the first.

A boy walking through a storm with nothing warm enough to protect him from the cold. His cheeks red from the cold, but it was his eyes I remembered most.

Sad eyes.

Something about those eyes stayed with me even so many years later.

The loneliness and the emptiness in his expression. The way he seemed completely alone in a city filled with millions of people.

I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know where he came from. I didn’t know where he was going. I only knew that he looked like someone the world was too cruel to.

The memory is blurry now.

Yet, I haven’t been able to forget him.

The sad and lonely boy.

Funny how that was the night I discovered skating. And somehow, without understanding why, I remember him too. Because the two memories have always lived side by side in my mind. Two completely unrelated things or at least that’s what I’ve always told myself.

The melody grows louder inside my head and Stephen’s voice follows it. Soft, broken in places and beautiful in others.

His song pushes something inside me open, and I skate faster.

I lean into the curve and push harder.

I also let my blades carve silver lines across the ice.

And as I fly freely with joy in my heart, I understand something my father has told me since I was born.

Some things are not meant to be explained, mio cuore. They are simply meant to be felt.

He was right.

Because I don’t understand half the things I’ve been feeling since arriving at Winter Storm but I feel them and maybe that’s enough.

I slow to a stop, my blades whispering against the ice as snow settles softly on my shoulders. I gaze across the frozen lake, toward the spot where Stephen’s music first found me.

I didn’t know it then, but I would learn the truth soon enough.

I had found the lonely boy. The boy who once wandered through a storm with nowhere to belong had grown into a man who turned his loneliness into music.

The lonely boy I couldn’t forget grew up to become the man who knew my soul by heart and turned its every frozen corner into a love song.

@khaosupdatesusa

Anyone else getting worried?

We haven’t heard a word from Khaos in days. South Korea is dealing with a historic snowstorm, and the man has completely disappeared from the internet.