The Cold Within

Seraphine Wilde had it everything – money, attractiveness, and more followers than most small countries.  With her diamond-studded shoes, immaculate photos, and designer moods, she strolled through life like a queen in a glass palace.  And within that glass fortress — a penthouse soaring above the metropolis — she lived unaffected by the world’s worries.

 Her face was on billboards, her skincare brand was setting records, and her weekend parties?  Invite-only and legendary.  But behind the gloss, Seraphine maintained a secret pride.  She looked down on the individuals who couldn’t keep up.  She pitied the impoverished, discarded the “messy,” and considered compassion a weakness.

 One stormy evening, as lightning laced the sky with silver and the wind howled through the city’s alleyways, Seraphine was cuddled up on her velvet sofa, scrolling through filtered perfection.  Suddenly, her smart doorbell chimed.  An old woman stood outdoors, soaking wet, her coat tattered, her hands quivering.

 “Please,” the lady pleaded, “just shelter from the rain.  Just for tonight.”

 Seraphine narrowed her eyes.  “Are you serious?”  She touched her security app and talked into the mic.  “This isn’t a soup kitchen.  Try the subway.”

 With a snarl, she terminated the broadcast and went back to her champagne and pictures.  But as she raised her glass, a flash of light flickered across her mirror — and a voice she couldn’t understand appeared to curl through the air like smoke: “As you have turned away, so shall the world.”

 The next morning, everything changed.

 Seraphine opened her eyes not to her silk sheets but to the hard, chilly ground of a back alley.  Her hands were injured.  Her clothing was ragged.  Her phone?  Gone.  Her reflection in a puddle showed a thin, pallid face — familiar, yet devoid of glamour.

 Confused and terrified, she staggered through the streets.  No one recognised her.  She attempted to tell them who she was, but they laughed or turned away.  She pleaded for food, but all she got were expressions of sympathy — or worse, disdain.

 Days passed to weeks.  Seraphine felt hunger claw at her bones and wind chill her flesh.  She learnt the hard rhythm of street existence — which corners were secure, which dumpsters contained scraps, how to make cardboard seem like a blanket.

 She despised it.  But somewhere between the quiet and the anguish, something began to move.

 It started with a child called Mina — maybe eight or nine — who found her crouched behind a subway grate.

 “You look cold,” Mina observed.  Without hesitation, she pulled off her scarf — a frayed rainbow thing — and placed it around Seraphine’s neck.

 Seraphine, for the first time in her life, sobbed not from wrath or humiliation, but because someone noticed her.

 After that day, she began observing others.  An old man who shared his soup.  A single mom giving out half her meal.  Strangers expressing warmth without explanation.  She started helping, too — cleaning up rubbish, cradling sobbing children, donating what little she had.

 She listened to stories, heard heartbreaks, and earned names.  And slowly, the cold inside her chest began to melt.

 One rainy evening — nearly a mirror of the night it all began — Seraphine sat beneath an overpass, helping a kid bandage a wound.  A gentle glow filled the area, and when she glanced up, the old lady was there again — only now, she shimmered with a peaceful power, as if formed of moonlight and memories.

 “You found what you once refused,” the woman replied.  “You gave when you had nothing, and in doing so, you found everything.”

 Seraphine blinked — and suddenly, she was back.  In her penthouse.  Dressed in silk.  Phone vibrating with texts and likes.

 But her heart wasn’t the same.

 She didn’t go back to empty parties or vanity postings.  She utilised her platform to tell actual tales – the ones she’d heard on the street.  She supported shelters, founded a foundation, and returned regularly, not as a rescuer, but as someone who’d been saved.

 The media termed it a rebrand.  She called it being human.

 And that tiny rainbow scarf?  She kept it framed, over her bed, where her heart used to remain frozen.

 Moral: Sometimes, life destroys you not to punish you, but to rebuild you with a softer heart and clearer sight.