I woke up somewhere in the dark with my forehead against a cold bus window and snow on the hills outside, the kind of half sleep that overnight buses specialize in. The N740 had left Barcelona's Nord terminal a little before half past nine the night before, bound for Venice by way of Milan, and somewhere in the stretch of France before the Italian border the landscape had turned white without my noticing exactly when. I watched it for a while, not quite awake, before the bus dropped back down toward the coast and the snow gave way to ordinary grey morning again.
Milan's Lampugnano station took me in a little before eleven, my third time in this city in two months, which by now felt less like a coincidence and more like a running joke with myself. From there it was a subway and then a bus to get near Bocconi, where a friend lives and where I intended to drop a suitcase I had been dragging across a continent for reasons that made less sense every day.
An Open Zipper Somewhere on the Bus
I did not notice the backpack until I was nearly at my friend's door. The main zipper sat open, not torn, not forced, just open, the kind of open that only happens with hands that know exactly what they are doing. My stomach dropped before my brain caught up. Passport, still there. Wallet, still there. No cash to have taken in the first place, which is the only reason I can think of that whoever unzipped it on that crowded bus walked away with nothing.
Nothing was actually gone, and somehow that made it feel worse, not better.
My friend was as rattled as I was, standing in the doorway watching me pat down a bag that had, technically, failed at its one job and succeeded anyway. I was too wrecked from the road to properly feel anything about it yet. We went out for pizza instead, the kind of decision that solves nothing and helps regardless, and by the time we got back it was five in the afternoon and the whole incident had settled into the back of my head, where it would stay for the rest of the trip.
Milan was never going to be more than a hinge point. The suitcase stayed at my friend's place for good, twenty three kilograms of a decision I was done making, and from here on it was backpack only, whatever that meant for a winter about to get considerably colder. I bought a Eurail pass that afternoon and then had to decide, for the first time with the whole continent theoretically available, where to actually go.
Salzburg won on two reasons that felt sufficient at the time: an overnight departure, and a direct train. No changes, no thinking required at three in the morning. I opened the rail planner app, added the trip, and it told me I needed to reserve a seat for five euros, which I did without a second thought. Then it told me the reservation needed to be printed, and that printing could be done at the station.