It was warm in the bar, but the sun had set long ago and the dark amber of the beer resembled the colour of earth. I stole the occasional glance out the window, convinced that snow was fluttering in the streets, but saw nothing except the glitter black of asphalt under the halo of a streetlamp.

Aware that thoughts once uttered are irreversible things, our words crowded up against one another while time eroded us from the inside out. What power we have, slicing open our own histories with sharp blades of rhetoric, making incisions over where memories have long healed over.

The streets were not familiar. For one thing, they were far too wide. The featureless buildings that defined them were too tall, too cold, too everything. To compensate for the lack of scale and perspective, they lined the middle of the streets with lifeless trees strangled by speckled lights. If it were not for the road signs that glared large and green, we would have been lost getting here.

There wasn't time for all the stories needed to be told. The traveller knows that magic belongs only to moments frozen in a time and a place, that new memories are reborn by means of hastily scribbled words in a notebook, or a photograph captured like a butterfly in mid-flight.

When I returned to my room, I went to bed with the same song in my head as the one that crept into my consciousness in waking moments too many hours ago, long before I became who I now am.