I don’t think we know how to be human anymore. None of us. It’s too cold here to feel anything. I shiver and every bone in my body aches. Each day I pull myself up from the frozen ground, I think that maybe today I won’t be able. That my body will stick and I’ll never move again. But I keep getting up, I keep moving even though there doesn’t seem to be a point in it anymore. Once the snow and freezing rain started, it didn’t stop for ninety days. That’s what grandma said, anyway. It was long before I was born. The story always reminded me of an ancient book I read in school. It rained for forty days and nights, the lands flooded and killed almost every living thing. If only we had been so lucky. In the book, it was a punishment, though. This wasn’t punishment. At least I don’t think it is, even though it feels like it sometimes. I think this is just what the Earth does when it gets tired of keeping everything else warm and alive. When it wants to finally get some rest for itself. So while the Earth is slumbering away, maybe we were supposed to sleep, too. But we didn’t. We couldn’t. Humans aren’t built that way, to hibernate. We just keep going, keep moving, working and being. Because we don’t know how to stop and be still. Not for very long, at least. But like I said, most of us don’t know how to be human anymore. At least not like we used to be. Like Grandma talked about. Summer days spent running through fields of green grass, the sun high in the sky. A flaming, orange ball of fire heating the entire world. It sounded like a fairytale, but I know Grandma never spoke a word that wasn’t true. It wasn’t in her nature. And she was getting too old to get that creative anyway. She sat quietly in her chair in front of the wood stove most days, trying to keep warm, remembering the days when the sun was more than a bedtime story. When the world was alive, when people felt alive and knew what it meant to be human. Whatever that means, anyway.