Standing there with the wind brushing softly along the railings and the deep station-hollow breathing beneath the bridge—railhum lowhum hush—the word arrives in her mind without warning, not as a thought exactly but as a small warm disturbance in the cold machinery of the night, a memory-word, summer, and suddenly the air around her seems thinner with recollection as if the season itself were drifting up through the iron bars like faint heat from another year, and she remembers grass-bright afternoons in the Meadows when the sun lay flat across the open lawns and the city slowed into that peculiar Scottish half-summer where the sky never quite commits to evening and the light lingers, lingering, longpast nine o’clock, ten maybe, the world held in a quiet green suspension.

And the memory opens wider, picnicblankets laughterpatches frisbeespin sunlightglint and the smell of crushed grass rising beneath careless footsteps, and students lying back against backpacks with their eyes closed as if the sky itself were some great blue ceiling fan turning slowly above the park, and guitars somewhere at the far edge of the field playing the same two chords again and again—strumstrum hum—and voices drifting lazily across the lawns while dogs chased impossible tennis balls and the paths filled with bicycles rattling lightly over the pale gravel, and she remembers the warmth most of all, sunheat on the shoulders and the easy unthinking weight of a body lying in grass without any awareness of gravity except the comfortable pull of the earth beneath her back, and the smell of warm stone from the university buildings at the park’s edge and the quiet hum of bees moving through the clover patches—buzzdrift buzz—and the long patient afternoon stretching outward in that endless young way where time does not hurry but simply unfolds like a blanket being slowly shaken open across the day.

The strange thing now is how far away it feels, geographically, chronologically, in that subtle displacement the mind performs after certain moments divide a life into before and after, and the summer memory continues to glow somewhere behind her thoughts like a soft lantern—grasslight sunecho warmwind—while the present remains here on the bridge with its iron bars and its nightwind and its quiet downward pull, and she stands there listening to the trains below and the wind threading the railings and the distant city breathing around her, and the remembered meadow-summer flickers faintly through her mind like a fragment of sunlight that somehow wandered into the dark.