Beneath the Relentless Rain, the Quiet Survival of Shadows

Paola Lee, Philippines

The rain comes as if it has a grudge. It slants through the narrow streets, over tin roofs that have begun to rust like old teeth, and drifts into the corners of my small room where the air holds everything I cannot breathe aloud. There is a heaviness in the world here, a weight that presses on the skin and seeps into the bones. It is summer outside, but inside, inside is winter.

I wake to the hum of cicadas that never sleep and the water dripping from the leaky ceiling. The damp smells like fear and mildew and the faintest hint of despair. My mother, who rises before dawn, has already gone to work; the echo of her slippers on the floorboards a kind of apology I do not know how to return. The house is empty but for the shadows it leaves behind, stretching across the walls like long, accusatory fingers. I stare into my mirror, but I do not recognize myself. My reflection is fractured, the contours of my face misaligned by years of disuse and avoidance, the weight of other people’s words settling like frost upon my skin.

I learned early that survival is a series of negotiations with indifference. My father, who left before my memory solidified, left only cold calculations and promises never to be honored. My mother, who remains, is a furnace of exhaustion and quiet endurance, whose love is both shelter and pressure. I have been told to smile for photographs, for family, for strangers. I have been told to make myself smaller, to disappear like smoke, to endure silently. I have obeyed. 

But some nights, when the power fails and the humid air curls around me like a living thing, I allow myself to feel. To shiver not from cold but from the recognition that life does not bend for anyone, that it will leave frostbite on hearts just as readily as on skin. I write these thoughts on scraps of paper, in journals that smell faintly of rain and fear, hoping that putting them into words might keep them from settling too heavily into the marrow. 

Outside, the world is relentless. Children play in flooded alleys, their laughter bouncing off walls and into drains that cannot contain it. Vendors shout over the rain, hawking fish and plastic-wrapped foods. There is resilience here, yes, but it is brittle. It cracks under the first serious pressure of expectation, of poverty, of the subtle, grinding indifference of life. The heat is oppressive, the storms frequent, but it is the invisible winters that leave the deepest scars: the nights spent wondering if your existence is a burden, the mornings you wake knowing that no one will notice if you disappear, the weight of mirrors that refuse to lie, that reflect every perceived flaw as a judgment.

I think of frostbite as not merely physical. It is the freezing of the spirit. The slow numbness that comes when empathy is absent, when love is conditional, when the warmth of human contact is rationed like scarce sugar. I have felt it in the corridors of my school, where whispers of superiority and derision mingle with the humid air. I have felt it in friendships that were themselves fragile as glass. I have felt it in myself, in the way I curl into corners, in the way I avoid the mirror’s gaze, in the way I count the hours until the next opportunity to disappear.

And yet, under all this frost, there is a strange, stubborn pulse. Survival is not always heroic. Sometimes it is simply refusal: refusal to let the cold claim you entirely. I walk through puddles of rainwater and refuse to let the reflection of my misaligned, too-broad nose, my uneven lips, define the totality of my being. I write letters to myself that I will never send. I trace the contours of shadows and find a strange kinship in their crookedness. The world is indifferent, yes, but I am not yet finished.

I remember the night a typhoon tore through our neighborhood. The wind pressed against the windows as though it wanted to enter and rip everything apart. I lay on the floor, listening to the house creak, the trees groan, and the rain drum with a persistence I could not match. I thought of the people who had been cruel to me, the teachers who had turned their eyes when I needed guidance, the classmates whose laughter stung like hail against the skin. I thought of myself, of how fragile I was, of how I had learned to brace for impact. And I realized something: even frostbite can teach you how to endure. Even winter, even without snow, even without the promise of thaw, can instruct resilience. 

I recall the novels I hid under my bed: The Bell Jar, The Goldfinch, and fragments of Kafka tucked between pages of hastily scribbled notes. These books were both mirrors and windows. They reflected my despair and offered glimpses of possibilities beyond it. I saw characters bend beneath cruelty, despair, and neglect, yet continue. I saw reflections of my own frostbitten heart, and in them, a strange warmth.

Survival is in the small things. In pressing my face to a window fogged by rain, watching the world blur beyond it. In hearing the sound of my mother’s voice, raw from exhaustion, and understanding it as love. In feeling the heat of my own body, stubbornly refusing to succumb entirely to the cold that is not seasonal but existential. Survival is in the recognition of the frostbite, not the denial of it.

The market is a cruel place after storms. Mudslides clog roads, and yet, people still line up for the pork, meat, for the rice, for scraps of income that may vanish by noon. I walk through these streets carrying an invisible weight: the judgment of peers, the ridicule of strangers, the ghost of my own insecurities. Every day is a negotiation with frost that no thermometer can measure. Every breath is a defiance of the chill that creeps not from weather but from indifference, from apathy, from cruelty. 

I have seen frostbite eat friendships. The way people can be tender one day and absent the next, leaving only numb spaces in the places where warmth once dwelled. The frostbite of the world is a slow, grinding erosion. The frostbite of the heart is the shivering that occurs when someone says nothing while you scream inside. I have known it, and I have felt it. And yet, still, I continue. 

At night, when the electricity cuts, the house becomes a cavern. My reflection is ghosted on the walls by lightning flashing beyond the window. I trace its movements. Sometimes it is more familiar than the person I see in mirrors. Sometimes it is stranger. I count the beats of my heart and measure the intervals like lessons in endurance. I whisper to the empty room, “You are here. You are enough.” Sometimes, I believe it. Sometimes, only the echoes believe it.

And yet, even here, life presses on. My mother returns with her groceries, soaked and exhausted. She smiles. I smile. The frost does not fully recede, but it loosens. I pour hot water over rice and fish. The room fills with the steam of survival, ephemeral and fleeting, but real. Even frostbite leaves tracks of warmth if you know where to look.

I carry my frostbite like a medal of endurance. Each scar, each shiver, each night spent alone counting the ceiling’s cracks is evidence not of failure but of persistence. I have learned to accept that the world’s indifference is not a reflection of my worth. I have learned that frostbite can coexist with growth. That coldness can teach resilience. That numbness can sharpen awareness. That grief can deepen appreciation. That apathy can fuel determination.

There are mornings when I finally look in the mirror without turning away. The face staring back is not perfected, not polished, not prettified by smiles or self-deception. It is uneasy, honest, raw, and alive. I touch my cheeks, my lips, my jawline, tracing the frost and the warmth simultaneously. I whisper, “You survived.” And in that whisper, I feel something thaw, a small pulse, a flicker. Not a flood. Not a resurrection. Just the promise that there can be light.

Frostbite is not the end. It is the pause before thaw, the whisper of resilience in the middle of relentless cruelty. It is the space where life persists quietly, stubbornly, beautifully. It is the weight of survival carried in silence. It is the acknowledgment that the world can freeze you in every way, and still you will find ways to be warm.

And so I walk into the streets, into the humid haze, into the world that will never pause for me, carrying frostbite on my skin and warmth in my chest. The chill is real, the cold is persistent, but so is endurance. And even when all seems brittle, even when laughter and light seem like impossible luxuries, I hold onto the fragments of warmth I find: a smile, a word, a book, a breath, a heartbeat.

This is winter. This is survival. This is frostbite. And in the quiet aftermath, even in the small, shivering victories, there is life.

Paola Lee is a student writer and emerging researcher. She is a former mentee in several international writing magazines and research mentorship programs, where she developed her voice in both creative and academic writing. Her poetry has been featured in the Hyper Moss Theorem mathematical poetry collaboration. Outside of writing, she enjoys reading young adult fiction, classics, and philosophical works. She is also often found listening to Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lorde while drafting her next piece.