Snow

The storm had dumped two and a half metres of powder on the valley, the kind of biblical snowfall that made everyone equal parts ecstatic and stupid. The pub had filled with the kind of damp, rosy-cheeked skiers who believed hot chocolate and rum counted as hydration. Someone had already died almost twice — first falling off the balcony, then suffocating face-down in the drift until three Norwegians grabbed his boots and yanked him out like a carrot. He came back inside insisting he “just needed a breather.”

Outside, the wind was howling like it too had been drinking.

Inside, the conversation was howling even louder.

Somebody was saying that Donnie and Benj had basically taken the Middle East, soaked it in lighter fluid, and tossed a Zippo in for dramatic effect — and no one was sure if this was geopolitics or performance art. A Swede at the bar said it was all a misunderstanding, because nothing could genuinely be that stupid. A Dane beside him disagreed: stupidity on that scale required careful planning.

Meanwhile chinese was being spoken of with the tone once reserved for responsible grandparents. “Say what you want,” someone muttered, “but at least they’re not livestreaming their own collapse.” Someone else suggested social scoring might be the only thing keeping civilisation from accidentally deleting itself. “Imagine,” he said, “an app that stops you tweeting while angry or prevents you running a country if you show signs of… well, being you.”

No one objected. Yeh, some areshole asks Grok to take someone’s clothes off, bang 10k straight out of their bank account, no money, bang community service, make arseholes think twice.

The avalanche cannons boomed again in the distance, when Pete leaned across the table with that look — the one that always means we’re about to accidentally reinvent metaphysics between sips.

“Time,” he said, “is not clocks, and not geometry-bookkeeping. It’s just… the pile of things you can’t go back to.”

Someone at the next table, caught the gist and raised his eyebrows, the air was full of little flurries, all with the potential to become the snowball that starts the avalanche.

Another flash of lightning — or some drunk with a headlamp, who knows — lit the corner where Anna was shaking snow out of her boots. She glanced over. “So the past,” she said, laughing, “is just all the shit that’s already fallen off your skis?”

“Exactly,” Pete said. “Return potential collapses. That’s entropy. That’s history. That’s why nothing repeats. Even if you want it to.”

“You’re saying the universe is like this pub,” Adam said. “Never the same disaster twice.”

“Right,” Pete nodded. “Different spill, different idiot, different kind of chaos.”

“Different balcony accident,” Marcin groaned in agreement.

And somehow, in the warmth of that alpine bar — with snow freezing on the windows, the world on fire in the south, Beijing acting like the adult in the room, and one semi-frozen man insisting he “meant to fall” — it all made a kind of sense.

Time wasn’t moving.
The world wasn’t unfolding.
The field was simply reshuffling itself, endlessly, beautifully, stupidly, never in the same arrangement twice.

And tomorrow we’d wake up to even deeper powder, new bruises, new hangovers, new headlines, new jokes — and absolutely zero chance of the universe ever repeating whatever weird alignment it had just put together.