When I returned to the town, snow, like yesterday’s tomorrow, had settled all around it; from the countryside beyond, I did not recognise immediately the shape of anything. Instead, I guessed at the true state of affairs by the places in which things remained, measuring each object not by the deceptive constraints of its establishment, but by the onus of its continuation. The church was still a church, if it was no longer my church; it had a reason to exist here, even if I had never understood it. To the side of my eyes I felt the shadow of its featureless floors and stone-buckled steps, and something in the monotonous, candle-faint idea of it instinctively reminded me of the sound of rain. I walked along a grey twitten past the secret door that has never opened; each year it grows rustier and more weathered; some day its locks and hinges must give out. Yet who’s to say that whatever it conceals hasn’t grown older, too? For some reason I feel convinced there is nothing but a briar forest beyond it now, the rampant branches tight against its walls, without even space for a cat to crawl.

I looked without nostalgia at the house in which I was born, noticing for the first time the patterns in the pebbledash; I counted for the first time the columns of the balcony. Neither observation seemed to complete anything, for there were a hundred further things I had yet to observe; most probably, I would never observe them, and this would not matter, either. Then I walked down the steps beside the railway line, along a snow-covered path perhaps still paved in pink, to the flatlands and the lake.

For a moment I thought she was a crow, there on the bridge. Then I understood my mistake, for she was still half the town away, and fifteen years behind. The memory seemed to sharpen both the slightness of her figure and its distance; it was as though the two were connected now by streaming, silver bands.

“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” I said.

In answer, she continued to look down into the silent river, rod poised, as if to demonstrate that, while motion might be lacking, there was no want of attentiveness or ambition on her part; and, watching her perched there with that long twig between her hands, I realised there was something infinitely cruel about her. It was a brute instinct, dating back deep into pre-humanity, when we had more or less limbs. Seeing those rapacious, hawk-like eyes calmly scanning the surface of the water, the thought that I had slept with her, and not just once but hundreds of times, suddenly disgusted me, as though I had had intercourse with an animal.

“What new thing will the past ever have to say?” she said at last. “Nothing new was ever learned from past endeavours. If something has been misplaced, you must go back to fix the lack yourself.”

But even as she spoke I found myself forgetting what she was saying; her speech did not emanate from life; instead I saw the silhouettes of enormous stones – like spaces from which houses had been torn - against a general twilight that rolled in from the hills; elsewhere, there were other women; they moved in courtyards overlooked by iron windows, their bare ankles like bleached milk. Among them, I found a book with a broken spine lying splayed in the street, but when I turned it over it stared back sightlessly, its pages already curdled with mud. Then at last I looked up and saw the sky was filled with whiteness; small-eyed and bright, the flakes moved evenly in unison, none of them wanting to settle, as though their streaming lightness, their structured freedom were timeless and unassailable. Everything was changing there, far above me; nothing was fixed; nothing was firm; nothing was determined, and, as I closed my eyes, a fleck of snow brushed my lips, like a kiss from another world.