She had committed herself, as much as she knew, to getting to know the ghost. It had taken years off her life and still she sometimes felt that she was no closer to its true nature than she had been on that frigid December day, when she was first penetrated by its coldness, biting into her much deeper than the weather had. It was something like love or weakness and from that day on, she sometimes barely but mostly completely welcomed the iciness, the isolation that flooded her insides, stole her wind, or felt like it anyway. Her relationship to the ghost, not that it was a relationship but it sometimes somehow resembled one, was something she felt she had to keep a secret, but with sadness, she realized then that when this cold wind was finally past, no external mark would be left and everything between them would well have never existed.