The silence sat under my toe the same way a crunched leaf wiggles after the savor of its crunch has been extinguished. It tiptoed across my shoulders and put its weight around me like a blanket. It muted the passing cars in their tracks by creating the tracks that muted them. And it pushed the forming tear back into my tear duct as I began to feel like a martyr.

You know those impossibly bad days? Those days where you swear that the cosmos crooked their pinky finger in your direction, which pulled the bench out from under you right when you sat down to eat your lunch? And then, oh Academiaus, who had a hoot watching you wipe the macaroni off your forty dollar blouse and climb back onto the bench, decides that messing with you is fun, so he will watch you squeam and squirm as you get your grade back on an essay that you thought you nailed. And then, of course, Cupidus Maximus Meanus comes along and shoots you with an “embarrass yourself arrow,” which takes over your vocal cords and forces you to say something that makes you beat your head against the nearest lunch tray and/or wall repeatedly until you think you can show your face in public again (even though it’s red and bruised from the lunch tray beating). You know those days?

Those “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad” Days where you look into your wallet and realize that you don’t even have enough money to move to Australia?

That has been my today, today.

And then there was silence. A blissful, glorious silence of snow blankets that wrapped around my shoulders and hugged until the tear in my duct slipped quietly back inside my eye and decided not to freeze down my cheeks.

Snow, my friends. It makes the world so quiet that even the air ventilation in a building seems loud. For whatever reason, the snow has enveloped me today in a little air pocket of solitude that makes my bad day melt away in the ice, as oxy-moronical as that seems.

The snow saved me today, in all of its silent goodness.