I would choose you

Snowbound

December arrived like the breath of something ancient - gray, breathless, and slow. The snow didn’t fall with force, only persistence, gathering in the corners of stone staircases, cloaking tree branches until they bowed under its quiet weight. It muffled everything: our footsteps, our laughter, even the strike of the chapel bell seemed subdued, as if the whole college were being hushed by winter itself.

Inside the library, we settled into a rhythm. Exam season had begun, though no one dared to call it that with the way we moved - half-hearted, drifting between the dorms, the classrooms, and the warmest spots in the library like snowflakes avoiding the wind. Officially, we had only two exams, one for philosophy and another for aesthetics, and a single final paper for literature. It should’ve felt light. But there was something about the silence of winter that made everything feel heavier.

We decided to meet every other day in the old reading room near the west wing of the library, where the radiator moaned and the windows fogged with condensation from our breath. Abraham brought the notes; Nicole brought a flask of green tea; Arthur brought enthusiasm and nothing else.

“Okay,” Abraham announced one afternoon, spreading his philosophy textbook wide like a map. “Today, we tackle epistemology. By the end of this session, you’ll all be experts on what we can and cannot know.”

“Can I know I want to die?” Arthur asked, slouched backward in his chair.

“You can know that you believe it,” Abraham answered seriously.

We groaned. Then laughed.

Nicole flipped open her notebook, every line underlined in a different color. “I don’t know what’s more impressive, Abraham’s understanding or Arthur’s commitment to melodrama.”

“I like to think of myself as a tragic figure,” Arthur replied. “Aesthetically depressed.”

Maria rolled her eyes, already scribbling notes.

Hannah had pulled her knees up onto the chair beside me, a scarf wrapped twice around her head even indoors. “What’s the point of studying aesthetics in a place this ugly?” she asked. “No offense, but if I see one more gray hallway, I’m going to lose my mind.”

I laughed. “It’s not about the beauty of the building. It’s about understanding how we define beauty itself.”

Hannah made a face. “That’s worse.”

“You’re all missing the point,” Abraham said, holding up a finger. “We’re meant to suffer. Suffering is part of the process.”

“Tell that to prof M. when she dozes off during our exam,” Arthur muttered.

We kept going like that—some studying, some debating, some sheer nonsense in the shape of preparation. But it worked.

Between group sessions, I read quietly with Hannah or studied with Nicole in our room. The paper for literature was finished earlier than expected, and every time I crossed something off my to-do list, the air felt a little less thick.

It was during one of those late sessions, when the library had thinned and the light had shifted into something buttery and low, that Arthur leaned back in his chair and said, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting out of here the second this exam season ends.”

“Where to?” I asked, stretching.

“My family’s lake house,” he said. “It’s up north, near the border. Middle of nowhere. Just snow and pine trees and a fireplace.”

He smiled with a warm kind of smile, unpretentious, wistful.

“It’s my favorite place in the world,” he added. “I go there every winter. It’s the only time I actually breathe.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Maria said softly.

“It’s magical,” Arthur said. “There are no people, no clocks, even my family never comes there. Just... quiet. A good kind.”

“I’d love to see it someday,” Hannah said.

“You all should come,” Arthur offered, and it didn’t sound like a throwaway comment. It sounded real. “We could go one weekend. I’ve got enough room. No rules. No schedules. Just us.”

Everyone nodded.

Then I said, “If we’re not spending Christmas together, we should still do something before the break.”

“Like what?” asked August, who had been silent until now.

I hesitated. “Secret Santa?”

The others looked at me.

“You know,” I continued. “We each get a name. Buy, or rather make, a little something small. It’ll be fun.”

“I like that,” Nicole said.

“Same,” said Hannah. “I used to do that with my cousins. It made me feel close to people.”

Maria nodded. “Alright. I’m in.”

We tore a page from Abraham’s notes and ripped it into slips. Names were scrawled and folded. I reached into Hannah’s knit hat and pulled one.

Arthur.

I folded it twice and tucked it into my pocket, feeling weirdly nervous, like I’d just agreed to keep a very small secret.

On the way back to the dorm, Hannah bumped my arm. “So?” she whispered. “Who did you get?”

“Can’t say. Against the rules.”

She smirked. “It’s Arthur, isn’t it?”

I stared at her. “How...”

“I can read you like an open book dear.”

I sighed. “Fine. Yes. But keep it to yourself.”

She giggled. “I got August.”

“Best friends,” I said. “Of course you did.”

“That's how I guessed you got Arthur. Exactly, best friends, it's fate.”

“Only if fate can knit,” I replied.

⸻

The snow worsened like a fever - slowly at first, then all at once. By the twelfth of December, it had stopped melting during the day. By the fourteenth, the college began sending out warnings. The roads leading into the valley were being closed, one by one. The train company posted a notice in the dining hall: all outbound service suspended until further notice.

On the fifteenth, we heard that the last bus had turned back. Some student claimed the food truck hadn’t made it through the pass, which explained the sudden disappearance of fresh fruit from the dining hall.

That evening, after our final study session, we all lingered longer than usual. No one wanted to say it out loud, but we all knew.

We weren’t going anywhere.

“I guess that’s that,” Arthur said, his voice strangely cheerful as he folded the campus notice. “Looks like Christmas at P.”

No one responded right away.

“Should we tell our families?” Maria asked quietly.

“Mine will panic,” Nicole said.

“I wish I can borrow the snowmobile,” he said flatly “And ride back home. It's warm there.”

That broke the tension.

We decided to write letters.

We gathered in the common room with mugs of tea, candles lit against the dim yellow lighting overhead. The radio, set low, hummed with some old violin piece I didn’t recognize.

The man who delivered supplies to the school once a week had returned that morning on a red snowmobile. He came wrapped in layers of wool and leather, like a creature from some folktale, with a thick scarf up to his eyes and only his frost-covered lashes visible. We were told he’d take our letters back through the pass, if the weather allowed.

So we wrote.

Dear Mom. Dear Dad. Dear whoever needed to know.

I wrote slowly, trying to sound calm even though a part of me felt a strange flutter of nerves. Not fear exactly, more like a deep, tight feeling of being far away. Of being unreachable.

⸻

Dear Mom, Dear Dad,

The snow is getting worse, and all trains have been canceled until further notice. It looks like we’ll be spending the holidays here. I’ll be okay. I’m with Hannah and Nicole, and we’ve been taking care of each other.

The exams are almost done. We had our last study group today.

I’ll write again when we know more. I really miss you, kiss grandma for me.

Love,

Sylvia

⸻

I folded the letter carefully and sealed it.

“I feel like we’re on some Arctic expedition,” Arthur said. “The kind where people vanish and their diaries are found a hundred years later.”

“That’s comforting,” Maria muttered.

“You know what I mean. The drama of it all. Us, trapped in some forgotten school, writing home like soldiers.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Hannah said, but she was smiling.

We handed the letters to the man the next morning. He didn’t remove his scarf, didn’t say much, just took the stack carefully and placed it in a large red canvas bag strapped behind the seat of his snowmobile.

“I’ll bring back anything I can,” he said. “But I wouldn’t count on supplies for another week or two. Weather’s worse down the mountain.”

Then he drove off into the white.

⸻

The last two days of exams felt surreal. The kind of tired that makes you want to laugh for no reason settled into all of us. The aesthetics final took place in the university museum, beneath the cold stares of marble busts and dusty oil portraits. The Philosophy exam, we all agreed, was cruel and vague, like it had been written in a foreign language and badly translated into English.

We turned in our literature papers just before midnight on the seventeenth. I dropped mine off in the wooden submission box outside professor T's office, the hallway echoing with every footstep. It felt anticlimactic. No deadline panic, no celebration. Just the strange stillness of everything being over and nothing beginning.

That night, we tried to celebrate.

We gathered again in the boys’ room - seven of us, since Violet had already made it home. She was the only one living close enough that she didn't need a train to get home.

Maria made mint tea. We sat on the floor, backs against beds or walls or each other, and didn’t talk about presents or holidays. We didn’t talk about being stuck. But the feeling of it hung in the air like the frost on the inside of the windows.

No one said it, but we were all tired - tired of the rules, the grayness, the sameness of the view outside every window. The snow didn’t sparkle anymore. It just fell, endlessly, indistinguishably from the sky it came from.

“I wish I could see something green,” Nicole said, out of nowhere. “Anything alive.”

“Should’ve saved one of those oranges,” Abraham said.

We laughed, but it didn’t last long.

I looked around at the group: Maria, quiet and warm, holding her mug with both hands. Abraham cross-legged with his notebook still beside him, even now. Arthur with his head tilted back against the bed, humming softly under his breath. Hannah curled against my side, already half-asleep. Nicole, sitting close enough that our shoulders just barely touched.

And I thought: this is not how it was supposed to be. But maybe... maybe it was okay.