I always get insomnia at the hotels. First I can’t fall asleep, then I wake up every half an hour till the sun is up and we can go and have breakfast. It was no different this time. Even though I had woke up that day at 6am to drive to the lake and we spent the whole day skiing I still could not fall sleep.

I was laying in the big and comfortable bed, in a ski resort hotel suite that was almost as big as my apartment. And I could see the stars through the large window. And I was thinking about this perfect slope that we skied today. It was white and vast and shiny. You could feel the sun on your lips when you stood on the top of the slope  before heading downhill. And then I thought that a kiss would have made that moment even more perfect. Like if you could kiss somebody, silently and passionately, and then ski down the slope. When you start going down you feel the cold air and your face and lips get frozen for a moment and all you can think of is maintaining your posture and your balance. And then you do not feel the cold any longer.

I was awake in between of the white sheets of the king size hotel bed. I looked at the stars and remembered how this summer somebody sung behind my back a little song with the words, “if you wish upon a star, it does not matter where you are”. And I turned my head and looked at the man who was singing. It was close to midnight, we were standing next to a fire in an outdoor restaurant in these same mountains, I had a glass of wine in my hand and he had a beer. And I asked him if this was true, if it really did not matter where you were when you wished upon a star. And he sung more and we chatted and towards the end of the night he jokingly asked me if I would marry him, because he liked my eyes. And I smiled and told him that I will not marry him, but I loved his comment about the eyes. I told him that nobody said that to me. And this was true. And he looked past me and carefully pacing his words said into the night air, “Are they all blind that they do not see the beauty of the blue?”. And I smiled again and left the place. It was way past midnight, it was July and I could not sleep anyway.

And right now I was laying in the bed looking at the stars. I’ve always believed that the best thing about the stars was that two people could see them from different parts of the globe. The stars and the moon are the only things that can unite two people on different continents. I used to think so when I lived in Barcelona. I would look at the stars at night and think that somebody half way across the globe can see the same stars too. And the distances shrank and became inexistent. And everything was bearable then. Because two people can see the same stars, as if they were sitting next to each other.

It was around 4am when I saw the moon. It was huge. It was also deep yellow. You only see the moon like this when you are high in the mountains. I got out of bed and went to the balcony. The air was cold. The silence was like a blanket. You could not hear anything. You just stood there with the stars and the moon. The moon was setting behind the mountains. I watched it disappear and then it looked as if the mountains were on fire. Mountains were still covered with snow in late April. And the snow became bright orange. I stood there for a while, till I could not stand the cold any longer. I went inside and crawled into my bed.

I felt asleep towards the morning, when the sun was up and the kids were ready for another day on the slopes. I pushed myself out of bed and we went down for breakfast. The coffee tasted good and the mountains shined with some fresh snow. And I was happy skiing in late April.