Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Atwood frames writing as an act that may have no stable, identifiable audience—yet still feels necessary. The comparison to children scrawling their names in snow emphasizes ephemerality (the mark will melt) and the primal urge to leave a trace: to assert “I was here,” even if no one reads it. The line also suggests that authorship is partly self-addressed, a gesture toward an imagined witness or future self rather than a guaranteed public. In this view, literature is less a transaction with readers than a vulnerable, temporary inscription against oblivion.