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The first thing Jack learned was his name, cradled in the shape of the moon.
But no, that’s not right. Thinking back, the first thing Jack learned, somewhere between the first brisk breath of cold and the blue streamers of light twisted through water—through black waters even before, black like he would soon learn the night sky was black, crow’s feathers and ripe berries and fire smoke are black—the first thing Jack ever learned was fear. He was born into fear, and so it only made sense to grow into fighting it off in any way he could.
Jack learned his name. And he learned fun.
He learned moonlight on frost and how it glistens so brightly through each crystal. He discovered beauty in the frosted limbs of a pine, awe in a breath of snowflakes against the stars, and when he threw himself into the Wind and it snatched him up into the sky, he learned laughter. A racing heart.
Fun.
And with curiosity—did he learn it, or had it simply been there, as much a part of him as the ice in his bones?— with so much curiosity, he hurled himself up, up, up, sailed like a snowflake caught on the back of the Wind, and went to learn more things from the strange orange lights in the distant trees.
And though he had learned of fingers and toes and hellos as he sped through limb and lee and greeted each young snowdrift by name, in that first town with its shivering people he learned that there are others with these same things, dozens and dozens of fingers and quite as many toes and wide, wide eyes, though perhaps not quite so wide the older and larger one grew. Jack wanted to press his fingertips into frowning cheeks until they smiled (smiling he had not needed to learn either, not really, another part of himself that simply was) and to hear their laughter when he tripped over himself to greet them hullo, halloo, hello.
But people do not laugh and smile for the unseen. They simply pass through, and shiver, and their eyes never once meet his to say as they seem to one to the other, “You are not alone.” One to the other, but never to Jack.
So Jack learned alone. Alone, what quickly turned to lonely. Lonely, what cannot be fought off with snowballs and winter flurries. The closest Jack could learn of that elusive ‘not alone’ came only when his unsmiling people passed through him, scattering him apart like a wind through bright autumn leaves. For a moment not himself but not not himself, coming back together with the realized pain that something is missing, he felt—something. Someone. A touch of warmth remembered and that is all.