You draw one icy breath before the blizzard snatches it away. You moan in the same key as the storm, a polyphonic nightmare sound: ice cracking across a wide lake, a melody of numbness, backed by whispers of death and the rhythmic thud of something nearby swinging in the wind. A blizzard is blindness, confusion, cessation.

The cold of a blizzard is the breath of the void, a great howling absence prying at the window’s edge, the gap beneath the door, suckling every drop of light and energy, warmth and blood, even movement itself. It wants nothing less than the utter eternal molecular death of the universe.

That’s what you hear outside in a blizzard. It calls to you, but it’s a trap unless you also love the void.

You have to go out in it, though. You have to. Even Winston the dog is reluctant. Normally stoic, he turns his face away from the wind only to find there is no away from the wind. It turns and turns around you and the dog, tugging at his ears and finding a way down your collar, past a deep furred hood and scarf, straight through your wintriest coat (but it’s an old coat now and the zipper doesn’t work and the buttons leave wide spaces just the size of winter’s fingers and maybe you could get a new coat before next year, before the next storm). The wind pulls snow from the ground and sky into icy tornadoes, into sheets that drape across your eyes like a funeral shroud. You can see nothing. The tree beside you has always been there, but it vanishes too. You put your hand out to touch the trunk, to reassure yourself that it’s still there.

It’s there.

But is it? Because you lost track of north and west and east ages (seconds) ago and now up and down have gone, too. The universe is a uniform dirty gray lashed by white. Wind files snowflakes to jagged points that scour the flesh and make you squeeze your eyes shut tight. Not the trunk of a tree, but the leg of some great, ancient beast, collapsed in ruin here of all places. Here, of all places.

Out here where you’ll die, too, and add to the pile of bones.

Only then the ice pauses in its flensing of your face, and the world fades partly into view, and the dog knows his way back to the house, pulling you gently onward from his end of the leash. It was only fifty feet or so from your side door, which leads to a well-lit home warmed by a friendly wood stove.

But for a moment there—yes, maybe more than one—you knew that you could die out there. It felt almost a certainty. The void sang its low and endlessly descending note, and you could have fallen into it forever.

Later, you’ll think: Well, some people did. After the storm, stories emerge like half frozen corpses from melting snow piles. On city streets, just feet from warm neighbors, they were lost to the white void. That is a nightmare, to walk half a block and freeze to death in slow motion, or to be trapped in your car with enough battery to livestream the dwindling of your life force to your family, who could do nothing. To be rescued, perhaps, but not before you’d lost all your fingers. To the void.

You’ve been through bad storms, of course. Like the one time it snowed so hard your car was buried while you were driving it. Like the ice storm in ’98, every tree for fifty miles flattened, massive high tension towers collapsed like mecha melted in the final battle of some great alien war. You were even alive in ’77, the last time the Wendigo wind came screaming out of the north. Maybe too long ago. People forget.

People forget that the wind and ice and snow destroy electric lines and switching stations. Leaves you powerless. Like how you feel knowing your parents—older, frailer now—have no heat and it’s close to zero degrees Fahrenheit out and they can see their breath in their house. Your mom texts you goodnight and it feels ominous. It feels final. You sit there sobbing for hours imagining them side by side under blankets, getting colder and colder still as the void draws in close, whispers to them cold and wet, “Sleep now.”

You’d call someone to help, or go get them yourself, except the roads have been impassable since yesterday morning. You’re listening to the police scanner and you hear the call: no units available for rescue, fire, medical, or police calls.

The heaviest equipment can’t make it through the storm. The region’s fire trucks have become encased in massive drifts of snow one by one. So it isn’t so far-fetched. People are dying in their homes. If you’d realized how bad it would be, or thought of it sooner, you could have helped them, maybe. They’d be nice and warm here with you. Let that thought hang from your heart for a while.

Heavy, isn’t it?

All storms end, though. Later, you talk to a lot of people about that one. How it was unlike anything they’d ever experienced. You thought to yourself at the time that the storm felt alive. Alive and malevolent. What quirk of the human mind made it feel so clearly that there was something out there, something undefinable and unknown, but intelligent and vicious? How could a storm seem to have intent?

But everyone you talk to who was there, unprompted, says the same thing about it. “It felt alive, man. And evil.”

That feeling seems far away in late April (has it really only been four months since those terrible frozen nights?). But there will be more winters. Some hard ones. Some mild ones. You might never experience another blizzard in your life.

But you will, with absolute certainty, hear the wind howl and the ice pellets clatter against the aluminum siding and remember. Remember when it felt like something dark and shaggy and taller than trees clambered from the depths of the Hudson Bay and made its steady, inevitable way south, carrying winter in its paws and death in its teeth.

Remember when the void sang and some part of you, some black ice frozen shard of your soul, sang along with it. Because it already knew the words.