I wake up in a haphazard frame of mind, wanting and not wanting to do this. I ramble through my morning pages and decide “it is hard” the whole living alone thing. I smile at the cliché of not being able to get someone out of my head – of how they haunt the many pages of my journal – and decide, ok then, why not just let them live there. Inside your head. It’s not like they can do any more damage to your wounded psyche. Not like there’s any fragility in there, still unshattered. Why not just love them regardless.
None of that has any bearing on the day ahead. I share it because it shows that side of me that not many get to see. My hesitancy about, well, everything really.
And somewhere along the line I made the decision to tell it like it is. All of it.
My original plans for the trip have already been shuffled, accepting that it makes more sense to walk on the day I wake up “nearly-there”, rather than on the one that involves a greater degree of travelling, buses and trains and connections and unknown waiting times. Accepting this as a travel day opens it up to take its own time.
I make a note to myself: factor in “slowly”, factor in “unfolding, not controlling”.
Meanwhile I breakfast on raw cauliflower, with a side order of nuts and dried fruit. And the last of last night’s cider. Let’s not pretend that I’m anywhere near getting my life sorted. I thought I was. I was wrong. I’m sure there is a rule about ‘no alcohol’ until the sun is over the yard arm, but I’m not living by anybody’s rules now. Not even my own.
There are dandelion clocks on the verge, marking time, through spring into May. Not soon enough. In the cemetery, I find myself backtracking a few steps to pick up a soft white feather, that reminds me I am watched over by angels. The pack that was heavy in my hands, sits more easily on my shoulders. I inhale the hazy sunshine.
Watching from the train window, I see trees that lament the missing hedges in between. On recently harrowed fields, I plot the ghost-paths that run from church to village to church. Silver birches shine. A pale horse stands steadfast in his field, one eye watching the passing of this steel and fibreglass creature rushing onwards. I don’t know what his other eye sees. A lonely horse. Just standing. Waiting.
They say it is only humans who wish to be other than we are, but who knows what that equine mind was pondering in that moment? Can you say with certainty that it didn’t want to leap into our carriage and fly towards the sea? Or remember riders it doesn’t see anymore? Or stablemates now gone?
The bus waits for the train, ignoring its own timetable. Verges are lime-bright with alexanders and the grey blue sea plays hide and seek on the horizon. The coast road takes me westwards.
Later, on the beach, my angel feather escapes but does not go far. Settles on mud and waits to be retrieved. Angels like to test us, it would seem. From another pocket a tissue escapes. There’s no catching this one. Like some origami bird it unfolds and flies away.
I keep walking.
Beyond a dip in the beach, seals have hauled out. About half a dozen greys, and a little apart from them, a pair of harbours. They’re comfortable. The beach is quiet on this still cold, end of April day and they’re out of sight of most who stroll the soft sand by the huts and the pines. The few who come down to the water give them quarter.
I walk by the channel, too uncertain of the tides to risk the banks down to the waves’ edge. The wavelets whisper in the distance. Pee-wit calls, or more accurately a pee-woo sound echoes on the wind. A cold wind.
Under such a wide weight of sky, it is easier to look down. I collect footprints: human, wader bird, dog paws, clawed things where the water shadow looks as though claws had been left behind, or the whole sucked down and feet the last to go – a print trying to hold on to the shifting sand.
I pick up cockle shells and muse upon their stripes and colours. What do they tell of the lives lived within? Is every ring, like those of trees, a year of growth? Does the depth of colour speak to warmer or colder waters, or to the abundance of food? Are the blues-&-greys so very different from the amber-&-brown? And do they know each other as kin, or as something else, or – perhaps –not at all? How does a cockle sense its world, and does it dream?
Eventually I return to the harbour and buy fish & chips to eat outside with my fingers. The gulls hereabouts are well-behaved. It is a flock of sparrows that I have to challenge for my dinner, but they soon get the message and hunker down to hunt for seeds or worms on the new-mown bank of the sea defence berm.
Pretty little things, sparrows. Sparkling. Like light on the mud-flats and the creek. Dark, and sprinkled with diamonds.
Some days are like sparrows, too.
