I was eleven years old when I first saw the snow.

For the first decade of my life, my world only extended as far as California. I knew I had been born in some exotic foreign country, but, like all foreign, exotic things, my birthplace did not seem real. For me, California was my home.

When I was about halfway through fifth grade, my parents began talking about a terrible disaster that was going to tear apart the country. I didn’t completely understand what it was, but I knew it was called a recession, and that it was going to make everyone poor. I didn’t pay much attention to the recession. After all, it didn’t really concern me; I was only ten years old. What I didn’t realize was that the recession did affect my parents.

One day, they pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and told me that my dad was going to get a new job. Somewhere in this conversation, they managed to slip in the fact that this new job was in Spokane, Washington.

Within a matter of months, the world fell apart beneath my feet. It split open and grew larger and filled itself with strange places and strange people. My home was gone, and I was living instead on a chaotic, alien planet. My whole family was a stressful mess as they rushed to rebuild their entire lives, and I pretended to be calm so they wouldn’t have to worry about me.

I felt like everyone and everything was screaming at me, trying to get my attention. To everyone at my new school, I was an exciting new creature they had never seen before. I had dark skin, dark hair, and a name that no one could pronounce. I was small and loud, and everyone wanted to know how I was so good at math. For the first time ever, I realized I was different. I realized that people were fascinated not only by my newness, but by my strangeness.

I wasn’t ridiculed or bullied, but I was overwhelmed by the attention I was getting. I was completely confused by the wildness that had randomly possessed my life. I was so terrified of all the unfamiliar things that were hurling themselves at me, but I never had the chance to be afraid. Everyone thought I was being so brave and optimistic, and I never told them otherwise.

In the midst of all this madness, the winter rushed in. It blew in forcefully and without a single warning. And one morning, I woke up to find it was snowing. I had never seen snow before. I had seen miserable, dirty, icy lumps on the sides of freeways, and I had seen snow in tourist spots, flattened and ruined by the feet of a million other people. The snow I saw this morning was something else entirely. It was perfect and pure, as if it was falling straight from heaven.

It was a Saturday, and the whole city was sleeping. Except for me. I was astonishingly awake. I was being eaten alive by this insane feeling that, when everyone else did wake up, they would somehow snatch this moment away from me. So I pulled on one sweater and a pair of boots, and I crept out of the house like a guilty thief.

The air itself felt frozen, stinging as I breathed it in. Within seconds, my entire small body was numb. My fingertips were burning from the cold, but I couldn’t keep from touching the snow. It was such a clean feeling, to stand there, frozen to my bones.

In that moment, I felt perfectly, wonderfully empty. The snow had somehow quieted everything, including me. For the first time in months, I found silence. The snow had come and wiped away the world. There was no color, no movement, no sound. Only the silent whisper of soft ice whirling around me. I didn’t feel scared, or smothered, or strange. Somehow, the whispering of the snowflakes drowned out everything. Nothing existed except for me and the pure whiteness.

I stood there, knee deep in the snow, my body numb and my mind more awake than it had ever been. I couldn’t fathom the silence that was swirling around me, but I didn’t need to. It was enough to just stand there, silent, numb, frozen, and burning. Because, for the first time in my life, I knew what peace felt like.