He hadn’t been back there since that day. The day that destroyed his life, that robbed him of light and left him empty and calloused. He swore to never return to that place, not even now as his best friend begs for him to attend a graduation ceremony.

“I can’t. It’s too close,” he tells his friend over the phone, a pounding headache setting in.

“To where? Come on dude, it’s been too long since you’ve been home.” His friend responds.

“I can’t go back there,” he says cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder, “It’s too close Carter.”

“Too close to where?” Carter asks in frustration.

A moment of silence passes over the phone as he swallows headache pills down, trying to kill the ever-present roar in his ears. “The park,” he finally whispers to his friend.

“The par--, oh god I forgot,” Carter stumbles over his words, “I mean I didn’t forget it happened, I just--”

Carter's voice is cut off with a beep. Ragged breathing fills the now silent room. He knows that Carter meant well but it doesn’t matter. His breath leaves his body, and he desperately tries to hang on to reality, but he was already picturing that place. His treacherous memory wraps around his brain like a vice, transporting him back to that day. He grips the counter in front of him.

A flash of snow.

A whiff of blood.

An echo of a scream.

It was too late, he realized. He gave in, exhausted as the dam inside his mind finally broke, thrusting him from his apartment to a bitterly cold day years ago.

The cold seeped into his core, swirling around his entire body to snuff out any warmth hidden between the layers of his clothes. It was almost as if the air knew what was coming, that he would never feel warm again. The park was far too beautiful for the tragedy that would happen there that day. The ice encased trees still wrapped in their Christmas lights, the layer of white crystals covering the ground, they all twinkled in the sun. The peaceful blanket of snow and the bright blue sky that had shone that day was painted black in his memory. Police crime scene tape roped off the area on the east side of the lake, where the children had made an army of snowmen. Snowmen may as well have been the ones to kill her, the way he remembered them. He saw them as motionless statues that watched with unblinking eyes of coal as the life left her.The metallic air revolted him, the scent of blood and sharp bite of a frozen winter’s day was a fog around her where she lay. The stench of death awaited her departure so it could consume the cold air with a scent he would never wipe from his memory.

He could see himself moving now: he had pushed through the scent to get to her, his entire world slowed down. He didn’t know it then but his world would never speed back up again. The trees that guarded the lake seemed to march themselves closer to the red snow underneath her body, circling around and stretching their leaves over the group of paramedics that had tried so hard to save her. He looked to the sky. No trees there. Where was the looming darkness coming from then? Where was the choking fog of blackness and despair coming from? It was from her, no, it was from a lack of her. There was no light anymore. His vision blurred looking at her. The crushing weight of what was happening suffocated him. His face stung and the taste of salt filled his mouth. He gripped her hand, as if he could anchor her to this world.

His ears roared with sound, but it wasn’t the sirens, shouts or the chatter from the crowds that had gathered. It was the roar of crushing silence that only seemed to happen when you could no longer choke back the sobs that came from your very soul. He gripped her hand harder, begging her to stay with him. His hand flickered with a breath of warmth, the last she had to give him. The rest of his body may as well have been made of ice as he kneeled in the red slush steadily gathering around her dying body.

“Time of death, 3:18.”

That voice, the one that haunts his every dream, shocks him out of his memory and back to his reality. His ears roared with the silence of his apartment. “It’s too close Carter,” he whispers to the silence. What his friend had said was wrong, that place wasn’t home; his home was dead.

He could never go home again.