Mahmud first saw snow the year his father left.
He was eight, standing in the parking lot of a faded apartment block in Scarborough, his breath a small cloud in the sharp Canadian winter. His mother was inside, crying quietly over the kitchen sink, pretending to wash dishes that had already been washed twice. His father had closed the door without looking back.
Mahmud watched the snowflakes land on his bare hands, sting, then melting. Something inside him learned a lesson that day: if you open your hands, things land there but they don’t stay.
He did not have words for it yet, but the vulnerability had already begun to coil around him like a slow, invisible storm.
