I never knew you in the snow. Never held your warm hand through sheepskin gloves. Never warmed your hand through thin red skin. Or felt the chill of your back curled against my belly under cold sheets. With the frost building crystals on the glass in the corners of the window-frames. With our breath in the bedroom visible, liquid in the air. Never walked with you, our boots crunching in the ice and snow, cheeks stretched on our faces like a silk-screen over a frame and primed with red ink. Never sought out what was you beneath thick layers of winter clothing, never found you within woollen garments that concealed and itched. Never kissed your frozen lips at the point of thaw, when they tingled as the colour returned from your central core. Your hands folded gently round a steaming mug of coffee, smarting from the heat, and my hands round yours, warming their backs. We never looked out on mountains compressed with snow or listened in vain for birds muffled into silence. Birds sunk deep in the pine-woods where they hid against the dark. Where like us with our half-stocked shops they eked out the winter and slowed their metabolisms so that a few might come through. Nor, looking back, did we sit in coffee shops with fogged-up windows and the comfort of cigarette smoke rising in layers to ochre-stained ceilings. From which broad fans hung locked and motionless, recalling a calmer air. We never shared a plate of grey bread and sausage with mustard, or a bubbling bowl of gulasch while the trams clattered by outside, audible but invisible through the holy fug. Washed down with a glass of cold beer, wet with condensation. Our fur hats dripping melting snow from where they hung on the chair-backs behind us. The hubbub of human voices in the background, like a familiar tinnitus in our ears, a background hum, subconscious, welcoming. Not a frantic fly circling the eardrum seeking to escape. Not on this day, this imagined day, when we might have been together in the snow.

No, we never saw even one season’s change into another. Not the leaves forming or dropping, the grass pushing or subsiding, the flowers that come and go. We had a single summer, when every day was bright and warm, when it was too hot to lie side by side in the same bed at night. When you walked on your bare legs, your smooth legs, your twining vine-legs, uncovered and nurtured by the sun. We saw a single summer that was dry and bright, and it formed our hopes. No, it was only part of a summer, one short month, and not even that. Three whole weeks, and we only used two of them. And the sunlight of that short time cast a deep and long shadow. Which cools me now, here, in this place where we never were. And with the snow settling gently outside I hold the shadow of your hand in the warmth of mine and imagine something that never was and could never be. Zero and infinity. In a hand held differently.