We went looking for the center of a frozen world, only to find that the world has no center to give.

On the last day of 2017, I flew to Detroit to visit an old friend. Like most people our age, we felt the itch to do something that felt like "living." We hit the open road with no plan, eventually finding ourselves in a small town in Northern Michigan, buried under snow deep enough to swallow our ankles. We spent the afternoon tearing through the streets on rented snowmobiles, stopping only for a bowl of mediocre soup du jour at a local diner. In that climate, food isn't about flavor; it's about fuel. You stuff calories into your body as a defensive measure against the temperature.

By nightfall, we reached the Days Inn by Lake Cadillac. I was ready to let the year slip away in the warmth of a hotel bed, but my friend Tian had a different idea. He proposed a midnight trek: we would walk across the frozen lake—a thousand-acre expanse of silent white—and reach the dead center just as the clock struck twelve.

It was a hare-brained scheme, the kind of "audacious experience" we tell ourselves we need to mark the passage of time. So, we masked up and stepped out into the negative thirteen-degree air. The town was a relic, silent and still. The only sounds were the mournful howl of the wind and our own labored breaths. It felt like a scene from a Cormac McCarthy novel—desolate, unforgiving, and ancient.

As my boots gingerly met the ice, I felt that peculiar thrill. There is a specific exhilaration in walking where you shouldn't be able to stand. We marched toward the unknown, watching the shoreline civilization fade into a dim, orange blur. We were free, untethered, and invincible.

Until I heard the crack.

It wasn't a loud sound, but in that silence, it was a gunshot. In a heartbeat, my right foot was an inch deep in freezing water.

My mind raced like a deer in high beams, but my body stayed perfectly, unnaturally still. The world began to wobble. I tried to scream to Tian, who was trailing twelve feet behind, but my voice was a ghost of a whisper. Every instinct told me that the slightest twitch would be my last.

"The ice," I finally exhaled, my breath a plume of white panic. "It’s breaking."

We locked eyes. No more words were needed. We turned and ran with a ferocity I didn't know I possessed—the primal, ugly, beautiful urge to stay alive. We followed our own footprints back, the only map we had in a world that was trying to swallow us. The icy air sliced my lungs like a razor blade; my heart played a frantic, irregular drum solo against my ribs.

We eventually slowed down, safe or simply spent. I looked at my watch. The luminous digits read 00:02. The year had ended while we were running for our lives.

I turned to Tian, still gasping for oxygen in the dark. "Well," I said, "Happy New Year."