MC thoughts – winter breathing over the roads

Minus ten. A silence so clear it almost trembles in the air. Frost has wrapped its thin fingers around the trees’ bare branches, and the snow… well, it tries, but has not quite found its place yet. The landscape lies half-dressed, as if winter hesitates in the doorway yet already rules everything.

And I stand by the window, feeling the distance.
The distance to empty roads.
To the warmth brushing the back of my neck when the sun hangs low over a summer pass.
To the rush that slips past my ears when, for a moment, everything is simple.

The bike rests.
It breathes slowly in its winter sleep, and sometimes I think I hear an echo – a memory – of the engine’s final tick from last autumn. That small note that comes just as the machine falls silent, as if it were saying, “We’ll see each other again soon.”

And in this frozen time, it is memory that keeps me warm.
The bend that carried me like a promise.
The path down to the lake where the coffee tasted like more than coffee.
The sausage grilled in the embers of a day that refused to die just yet.
The laughter rising between tent walls as darkness settled gently over the ground.

At this time of year, you follow those memories like streaks of light in the snow.
You let them spin their own road network through heart and mind, until you almost feel the handlebars vibrating in hands that, for now, are empty.

And sometimes, when the wind falls completely still, I speak to my sleeping bike:

“The roads are waiting for us.
Frost cannot hold them forever.
One day the world will open again,
and we will follow its lines
just as we always have.”

Because even though winter rules for now,
spring is already on its way somewhere far off –
like a gentle engine revving long before it can be heard.

Stefan Lundin