Today, as the clock strikes seven on November twentieth, the wind is biting like a hound. I can hear it howling and rattling the shutters as I lie on my bed, twiddling my thumbs and fidgeting with pinprick anticipation; I try to lose myself in the candle flames dancing on my desk, but nothing can calm these nerves tonight. Just as one tiny flicker fades away to a soft amber glow, I hear the inimitable knock on the window: three sharp raps in quick succession, followed by a pause and then a hollow fourth. Of course, Kjersti is here.

I’m not allowed to even step into my slippers before Kjersti has smushed her nose up against the foggy glass - she knows it takes ages to get rid of those smudges, but she doesn’t care. If she’s in an especially good mood, she’ll even take the time to draw out with her index finger a smiley face or a lopsided heart.

I watch her toothy grin expand as I tiptoe across the frigid hardwood floors and fumble with the lock on the window. She mocks a dramatic shiver and leans woefully against the creaky railing of the fire escape platform as she waits for me to pry open the rusty bar and heave the window open; the Northern Complex was the first building of dormitories constructed for our college, so the facilities are naturally the most in need of maintenance.

Immediately as soon as I’ve hauled open the colossal window, a wave of icy air floods into the room and knocks out every single candle I had lit, casting a dark pall that Kjersti’s red-cheeked smile promptly illuminates.

“My God, did you walk here in that?” I huff while she climbs clumsily through the sill and yanks the window shut behind her, eyes watery and cheeks flushed bright red. She’s been sneaking into this dorm for a year now, and yet continues to make a fool out of herself every time she does.

“Hey, language!” She scolds me and clutches the thin gold cross that dangles from her neck for comedic effect, but she’s not actually upset - she’s already shedding her snow dusted parka and tossing it unceremoniously onto my desk chair. I cannot help but stare as Kjersti stretches a hand down toward her dangling haystack blonde braids; she is so undeniably Norwegian, such a painfully stereotypical Viking girl that it's hard not to laugh.

“Are you going to stand there all day?” Kjersti barks and strikes me out of my pondering stupor. I am constantly losing myself in my own thoughts around her, it's as though when Kjersti walks in, my good sense walks out. She never seems to mind, though, as she’s been putting up with me ever since our first year orientation. With just a glance into her sea blue eyes, the memory of that day comes flying back to me in vivid detail: I had made the fateful decision that morning not to tie my shoe before boarding the shuttle bus, convincing my ADHD rattled brain that I would remember to do it before reaching campus. Lo and behold, of course I didn’t remember - why would I? The sidewalks were already slick with a fine coating of morning sleet, even though it was only September, and the (un?)fortunate combination of the slippery ground and my unlaced shoe sent me careening into a surprised Kjersti Larsson, a girl everyone knew of but no one really knew. Kjersti, as most people understood, was untouchable, and I had just crashed into her at full force, causing our textbooks to scatter into the road and her backpack strap to finally snap (it had been hanging on by a thread for weeks already.) I will never forget the mortifying guilt I felt watching Kjersti’s backpack break from its hold and, with its immense weight, drag her down with it. We landed more or less on top of each other, and that was actually a pretty solid method of instant bonding, because Kjersti and I have been operating as borderline soulmates ever since.

Kjersti and I speak an unspoken language, one that I like to say is beat out in Morse code by our hearts. And so she knows, whether from the candles lining the wainscotting or the dull harmonies murmuring out of the stereo, that today is a day for quiet, for soft rain showers on metal roofs and rabbits’ tiny footprints in the snow - she crawls into bed with me. We lie there in a perfect silence and do not relight the candles, and do not question the forces that move her hand, particle by particle, into mine: soft and warm and peacefully surrendering.

I had not planned on falling asleep that night, but when I wake up, the bedroom is a sealed chamber of darkness, broken only by Kjersti’s silhouette perched on the edge of my bed. She must have heard the fluttering of my eyelashes or the thumping of my fitful heart, because suddenly she is staring back at me, her dreamy gaze visible only by the wan splash of moonlight seeping in. “Kjersti?” I whisper into the void and watch her head nod slightly, as if confirming that it is in fact her on the edge of my bed, and not some guardian angel sent down from the heavens to save me from what I knew - we knew - was coming. I should be over it by now, truly, for I found the letter on her desk over two months ago, but the idea that your soulmate is leaving you doesn’t really become concrete until the night her flight departs.

I feel her silken hand searching beneath the duvet until it finds my ankle; she touches me the way a poet pours himself onto the page, somehow balancing precision and abandon simultaneously.

Since the moment I introduced myself on that icy patch of sidewalk, accompanied by a shy smile and an awkward handshake, my ears have ached to hear Kjersti croon so lovingly the harsh and ugly syllables of my name, but now I wish that I were deaf.

“Sigrid,” she says, and I want to pretend that I am still asleep, but I can’t keep anything a secret around Kjersti. “It’s almost time.”

I slowly sit up in bed. I let the duvet drip down into a pile at my lap like molasses; I want to stretch out every second of this night, I want to cut the moon from its fragile suspension just to steal some time. I am the definition of greed.

“Is this it?” I murmur into the tresses of Kjersti’s golden hair that she has loosed from her braid, inhaling the teakwood musk like desperate oxygen.

“Sigrid, you say that like it's the end.”

I look up and meet her eyes, an abyssal Arctic sea drowning in warmth leaking from the corners, trailing down her ever rosy cheeks and dripping onto my own. Technically, this doesn’t have to be the end, but it sure as hell feels like a finale.

Ultimately, I do not tell her not to go. I do not clench her hand or tug her arm or even call her name as she drifts away from me and floats out of the open window, graceful in a ghostly way I’d never before seen. The midnight fog consumes her body before I can tell if she is looking over her shoulder to glimpse me one last time - I haven’t yet closed the window - but I listen carefully for the metallic clanging of her footsteps descending the fire escape until I hear no more, and then I know that she is gone.