Travels

5am. It always amazes you just how many people are up, which is a clear sign you’re not used to early mornings. They’re not even bleary eyed. They walk with an disarming purpose.

Then the train out into the country—a sheen of fog mixes with the haze of the rising sun, creating an uncertainty on the landscape. You could now be anywhere in this light, and million possibilities cross your mind, then before too soon you crash into the heavy discoloured brick of the city, every face looking anywhere but at you, every figure suited and flowing with a liquid purpose amongst the crowd. Only your stillness surprises you.

The flight, always the same, but always just as humbling as you’re hurtled through the cloud-base, and even as you look at it you think it strange, that you’re witnessing the dawn of some new physics. Everything looks the same from a certain height, even industrial sites possess a strange poetry to their intense shapes on the landscape, becoming something natural themselves.

The coastline, then nothing but the sea.

By Mark Newton

Born in 1981, live in the UK. I write about strange things.