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 layer of fog mixes with the haze of the rising sun, forcing an uncertainty across 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, flowing with a liquid purpose amongst the crowd. Only your own 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 maintains some identical sheen from a certain height, and 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.