This may, or may not, be the serialized start of something or other.

Don’t believe the feel-good hype, or in the vernacular of the 21st century, the meme of the snowflake: That ubiquitous myth of uniqueness that no two snowflakes are alike.

True, the outward appearances of snowflakes have a wide range of variance, as our own human appearances vary widely from one another. But with both snowflakes and humans, we vary only within the physical parameters within which we can be called a snowflake or a human. In the end, for all our differences, we’re just human, subject to what Shakespeare called “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, until we shuffle off this mortal coil.

We are like snowflakes in that important way, of course: we’re temporary.

But we can still tell a good story.