Cold White Halo

We trudge through the snow, and the exertion of it all has poked holes in our lungs. We can barely breathe through the high-stepping and moment’s connotations. She laughs as I step into a drift and fall forward, surprised by its depth. She gasps as I deftly form a loose snowball and throw it at her; not so hard that it could hurt, but certainly not so hesitantly that she could dodge it. She charges as I turn and run, and she tackles me into a mound of plowed snow.
I squirm about underneath her so I can face her. Our faces are inches apart, and where once was a haphazard pile of snow now lies stacks of kindling. Her lips hit mine like a torch at my feet. My teeth hurt, but, dammit, my soul does not. She starts to grind her hips against mine like flint on steel. And I wonder, really, if I want to make the paper for dry-humping in a blizzard. We both know it, but I gasp the words first. We should keep walking. I think she simmers a little; she recognizes it as the truth, but is miffed that I can control myself. I say it aloud to forestall any ruination. There are places I can’t wait to get to, you know—places where frostbite is much less likely, and time is no earthly matter. She smiles, amused at the implicit poetry, and we both stand together.
(Insert poem. Maybe a narrative poem?)
These are sunshine blocks we walk, really, ones that are made much better by summer and lengthened indefinitely by snowfall and barely contained desire. Dormant yards grow garments of snow, and the moonlight sews sequins throughout every square inch of the winter’s world overcoat. Our appreciation of it is dulled, however, by the sharpening of our most animal of instincts. Every step clips our breaths shorter, every stride becomes longer, every incandescent second of silence burns like a filament waiting on a light switch. The roads we walk become more obscure with every turn, like arteries to capillaries to whatever cell is our source and destination. I recognize her car in a driveway a few houses down; we run, now, giggling with the ridiculousness of it, thrumming with grace and honest disbelief. 
A woman stands at the end of her driveway looking fearfully expectant. Her long frock coat is ambivalent grey, but she wears a crimson crinoline scarf that laughs about in the susurrant storm. The snow has packed her in to mid-thigh, and I wonder how long she has been standing there, stock-straight and frozen like an ice sculpture. She opens her mouth to say something, but apparently decides against it and shuts it again. Don’t mind her, she says as she pulls me by my nearly trembling hand. It’s just my friend Sophia.
Cat tracks meander down her sidewalk in a haughty, nonchalant path. We follow it as its antithesis. The porch light flashes on like stage directions as we reach the door, and we’re imbued with luminescent fervor in the snowy corona of light. As she unlocks her door we are water through the crack in the dam; the time between the doorframe and the bedroom lurks someplace that my memory cannot reach. Just a single image, me on top of her on the stairs, fat flakes of snow around her head like a cold white halo.
(Insert poem about going at it. Ha.)
She sighs contentedly as her head found a place of comfort on my bare shoulder, and the top of her head glitters like a golden revelation in the window’s scattered moonlight. Everything looks better by moonlight, really, and I wonder how silver got stuck with such a cheapened reputation. She smells like a storm, like a dappled feral cat; she smells like gunpowder, all sulfur and saltpeter, and only time will decide whether she is a violent cannon salvo or a firework display.
Our legs are tangled, an improbable beige bow, and we don’t bother with blankets. Her breasts press against me as a pleasant buffer, her breath washes away the dog’s day in warm air and little unspoken promises. Oh, the implausibility of all this! Who follows unmarked roads along precipitous cliffs? I remind myself, though, there’s holiness in the fall. There remains nothing to fear but impact. And, although my grown up eyes can’t quite see the bottom of the chasm, my child’s imagination has flooded it with a soft and beautiful linen sea.
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Sleep creeps over me like a slow tide; like tides tend to do, it promises to leave behind dreams of seashells and pebbles, ancient seaweed starved of sunlight and black pearls that somehow captured the moonlight.  I think I hear breathing as I feel the water lap over my feet, and then my armored heart, and then my anxious butterfly eyelids; I think I hear rescue ships blaring the brazen alarum from their foghorns.  I knew it then, but I had managed to forget; I had convinced myself that tragedy was for the best.  Nothing is for anything, or ever will be; prepositions are entirely removed from the realm of human causality.  Even so, as the octopi inject their ink into my veins, as the angelfish swim unnamed shapes around me, as the kelp shrouds my rejuvenation, I may in fact spy the summer night between this winter’s sea bottom dreams. 
I don’t know the layout, I haven’t seen the blueprints, I haven’t dreamt god and given him to the world. There is little more to it than singular nights teeming with hopeful lust and lustful hope, and I resolve to write new words on my cluttered bedroom walls:
When life is scary, living is courageous.