The train enters Salzburg like a shaft of light, and the mountains are illuminated. What is it about snow on distant peaks that makes me want to laugh? Perhaps it is the impossibility that something so beautiful might exist.  

He and I are the first to reach the castle, high on the hill. Behind us, the town diminishes, the mountains widen. We climb to the top of the tower, and I remember, here, five years ago, with you beside me, at the end of our love but still in it, how those mountains looked to us.

Back down in the narrow streets, crowded by buildings the colour of pistachio, almond and lemon sorbet, walking with this new love of mine tastes oddly of betrayal.

I remember this row of buildings, I remember the photo you took then. I remember sitting there, on that bench in the Mirabell Gardens, eating our lunch. The bench is empty now, and there are no flowers. 

You and I didn’t see this church, this beautiful Franciscan church – we must have missed it five years ago. But remember the Collegiate Church we discovered, the one I’ve been telling everyone about? We went in today and it wasn’t the same. Something was different, the light maybe, and it was no longer the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen.

Perhaps it is I who have changed?

Time hangs heavy in my hands, and I don’t know what to do with it, nor where to put it all. There are streets and churches in the world that will always make me think of you, but the longer I live, the more time accumulates and deposits memory over memory. Places and people overlap, so that the street is no longer just yours, and the church belongs also to others.

My parents came to Salzburg, at the beginning of their love, when their life together was a dream not yet dreamt. They say it snowed. When I was two and a half, the three of us visited, it snowed then too, although I don’t remember. At ten years old, when we came again, I recall the warm yellow light brightening the narrow streets, and the sweetness of Mozart pralines.

Ten years after that, there was you, and five years later there was him, yet it was always Salzburg, and always me; every time I went, a new layer was added to the sediment of memory, and I have in this city now, a geology of love. Love and lives overlap, and over time, a map is drawn, and criss-crossed and crossed again, by all the people I’ve loved, and all the people I’ve been.

Evening seeps into the streets, pouring down from the mountains in rivers of light, and illuminates the carousel, its laughing children, and the Christmas market stalls selling woodcarvings and Glühwein.

He is standing in the square, holding a steaming cup, collar pulled up against the cold, smiling. When you and I were here it was spring. I reach out my hand to him, and I wonder –

Will it snow?

Whose hand will I hold next?

Who will I be then?

And which Salzburg will await me?