When it snows, there is a silence that lulls Lenox Avenue. There is a white noise that surrounds Black people in Brownstones. While walking to school Aaliyah immersed herself in the sound. She imagined that Harlem was a snow globe. The only upside to her world being shaken up was the way it made the snow fall. She noticed the somber solitude to each snowflake.

“They fall as if in love,” she thought to herself. In slow downward spirals, alone. If a snowflake is lucky they will find another snowflake to hold their hand. Then together, falling hard, they will commune with family and friends. Sticking together, grounded, becoming blank white sheets of snow that brings out the poet in small children like Aaliyah. With a melanin-dipped fingertip, she bent over, crouched low and wrote her melancholy.

“Help Me”

When she got to school the last bell had already rung. Her daydreaming made her late again. Her thoughts moved faster than her little legs. Scurrying up three flights of steps, pushing through the double doors of the staircase and floating above the crowds of school children filing into classrooms, Aaliyah finally made it to room 365.

She took her permanent seat by the window, where she could watch her stray ideas play in the snow. As Ms. Brown marked Aaliyah late, her nine-year-old frame folded into itself like heartbreak. “How embarrassing,” she mumbled to herself quietly. Aaliyah was not ashamed of being late but embarrassed because she could not understand why she always felt uneasy under the glare of another.

Aaliyah believed eyes and the crystal balls of gypsies to be one in the same. Both unveiled the past if you looked into them close enough, but she much rather preferred looking into snow globes than crystal balls.

Her world was still shaking and so the snow continued to fall outside.

Pulling out a number two pencil tattooed with the marks of her molars, she scribbled, “Why?” onto the desk before erasing it.

She is like a snowflake that falls alone. After landing on the ground, there is only a second left to marvel at her beauty, before she melts away.

-Janine