Sunlight sliced through the clouds, leaving them frayed and tattered in its wake.

Jessica sat by the kitchen window, slumped with one arm across her stomach and the other hanging limp on the cushioned arm of her chair. She watched the sunrise through a delicate tracery of frost clinging to the window in a fragile embrace. The light didn't satisfy itself with destroying the clouds, but turned its harsh heat on her window.

The frost melted to droplets and then the droplets evaporated to mist. For a lingering breathless moment her eyes followed its transient form, then the mist too frayed apart and dissolved. Nothing remained of it. Nothing but a memory, lingering only in her mind. Ephemeral. Once she forgot it, it would be gone. Gone as though it had never existed in the first place.

Instincts nagged at the back of her mind, a litany of the activities that once drove her. She ignored them, any feeling of urgency dulled by time and absence. The sun should have heralded a full day of activity. She should be starting breakfast.

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Should be...

Instead she stared across the yard, now laid bare, the absence of frost forcing her to acknowledge the changing of the season. For a moment Jessica's eyes met the sun's bright challenge. Only a moment. She blinked first, turned away. Defeated.

Under other circumstances the sunlight should have been comforting. Instead she shivered. She felt its heat against her face, stealing something from her even as it stole the definition from the snow and then took away the snow itself, something she couldn't name and couldn't reclaim. The last traces of winter were disappearing; the snowman dissolving into an uneven lump, small footprints turned to gaping empty holes that ate away at the surrounding snow.

Spring had overtaken winter, erasing all of it but memory.

She couldn't turn back time. Couldn't call back the cold. Couldn't undo the days lost.

Some things could never be replaced.

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