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     JANUARY rolled around quickly, far too quickly for his taste. It was as if the universe wanted him to be colder. As if it was procrastinating his mending.

     He continued on his path to nowhere and attempted to ignore the soft music playing from the loudspeakers down the road. Soft. He had felt nothing like "soft" since the cold came in.

     He wandered into the forest, where hanging icicles glistened on the bare branches of trees and a thick carpet of snow laid over the hardened ground. He kept walking, even as the sun melted the sky into a brilliant mixture of orange and rose; even as the dark settled over the woods and lone wolves cried out into the night.

     Then, a flash of blue caught his eye. He stopped, automatically turning his head to glimpse the color that invaded the darkness he held and, for a moment, let him feel.

     And he saw her.

     She peered out from behind the tree before him, a glowing blue goddess draped in garments of ice. He called out her name, and she vanished.

     In her place, a slip of paper settled into the snow, and he rushed forward to preserve it before it could be irreversibly damaged by the wet ice below it. She had written a single sentence.

"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness." 

-Aristotle

     He gasped with a shudder. He had shown her that quote, it was his favorite and always lingered in the back of his mind. Had she remembered? Even after all these months, had she come back to him? Or was he going mad?

     The quote didn't apply to him, he decided, as he was no excellent soul.

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