"nobody knows what the world is for"

someone said this tonight. we were lying on our backs in the snow next to the huron river. our feet were propped up on the fence in front of us and i could not feel my toes. the sky was that weird peach-grey glowing color, the snow was blue, and the trees looked like roots. if you tilted your head back, you could see the whole line of trees behind you, waxy through the snow that was still falling, their tops jagged like so many scratch marks. and when he said that, that nobody knows what the world is for, i almost believed him, except for that my favorite memories of anyone are usually not of them at all but of the way the world looked curling around them. it is probably very selfish and silly to say that the world is for curling around a person, but truthfully i can't imagine lying like that in any other place than where we were, with the snow lighting the sky up the color of skin and the river not listening and the cold on us so that we could not even move, and the trees so still we could not even leave.