Take two days, to feel the distance, and learn to relax through delays and the dashing to countermand the maybe-getting-there-later, which won’t even matter. Let tired eyes stop trying to focus on all the green blur you guess is trees and seek instead the carved white horse on the hillside. Walk into day two along unfamiliar streets because they are and you can and there is time to pull in the patterns in brickwork, black shadows of leaves on white-painted walls, dew glistening on motor cars and the old abandoned well that might, after all, be the simple whimsy of the council’s architect. Walk to witness the blue of the lagoon seen through the construction fence. Essential flood defence works say signs as if chicken wire will hold back the tide. You cannot taste the sea and all the gulls are silent. Go early to a bare room, with chairs, not unlike the doctor’s waiting room except that when you are called there will be a ship and you will be on your way again.
~
Beyond a salt-encrusted window watch the land slip, curved beaches, a row of old fisher cottages dwarfed by a castellated pleasure dome: did Kubla Kahn walk this green and pleasant land? Small boats navigate glitter-showers while, on the hill beyond, a bright tarn catches all the light it can to feed down through unseen streams, back to the sea. Watch yachts, the real kind, the ones with sails, not floating palaces, and jet-skis which sound like Russian aeroplanes and the one ramshackle painted wooden craft with its outboard motor and young men in knitted beanies. Watch the land receding, until all there is to see is sea…sea crinkled like tinfoil, sea the shade of shale or slate or blue-rinsed road surface, not aqua-marine although both of those, it is the darker shot-silk shade of the inner lining of the secret-keeper’s cape. And for a time that is all there is. Beyond the billowing orange tarp above the lifeboat, all there is…is sea-dark and sky-bright, sky white at the liminality rising and paling through water-wash shades before it has the confidence to deepen into the true blue of atmosphere.
~
Here is eternity. I know the width of this sea, but to be upon it denies that mileage. There is only sea and sky and a questionable notion of time. No ships. No turbines. No contrails in the sky. Only this softly breathing, gently undulating expanse of womb-scape. And I stop wishing for sight of the islands…I want this moment to go on forever. I want to sleep and wake and still be here, with the motor thrumming and the light glittering on barely shifting surfaces and not a troubled world anywhere out there to see. When we make landfall...when fairytales rise out of the waters and resolve themselves into mundane harbours...the slowness will be drowned.
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