Apparition premonition

I wake up early. The morning gathers up tendrils of night, slowly breathing light over the coast. I begin to run with eyes barely open, waves playing with my feet. As each wave recedes the sand grows soft and I pump my legs harder to keep the pace.



By the time I cover four beach-lengths I am running with sweat and sea, salty fingers pulling at my body. I dive in. Feel a stingray touch my leg.

The sea is calm and grey and I am completely alone.

The quiet cliffs remind me of Cornwall. I sit. My seventeen-year old self comes silently up behind me and squats in the sand, looking out at the blurred horizon.

I study this child. Right now I look more like her than I have in ten years. Her skin is transparent and I see the sand in drifts through her chest. She echoes through time and space, longing written all over her face.

I remember being her in this moment. I know what she is thinking. Something just happened to her that came as a shock, and she is deep in it, deep in the swirl of those big life questions.

This is the first moment she ever accepted the importance of not feeling insignificant.

She thinks that she will die before she is thirty. She is convinced, in fact, and she doesn't know why.

The sea looks the same to me as it does to her, even though mine belongs to southern Nicaragua instead of southern England. Twenty-seven years creep onto my face, hang from my limbs. As I look at this girl, so small and yet so endless, I am split by a deep understanding and at the same time a total incomprehension.

I don't quite know how to interpret her thoughts, so I walk away.

I pad through the sand to the water's edge, heels imprinting in the sand. Dive in once again. The water is cool and flows over my face. I duck again and again, feeling the heat being carried away from my burning skin.

The softness of everything wraps me gently. I watch the shore, as my younger self slowly fades away. Once again, I am alone.

Time = rate of change

Guatemala City is enormous, loud, and covered in Christmas. I had forgotten, of course. Its imminence should be obvious, but by now I'm used to that confusion; sometimes I genuinely have to decide whether it is May or November.



Every roundabout along Avenida Reforma radiates light. We pass a Gallo Cerveza tree, the traditional angel at the summit replaced with the beer company's neon cockerel head. Then a Coca Cola tree, perfect twinkling cylinder of red and white. Kind sponsors of Christmas around the world.


Krista and Mindi are my companions in the car; two in a long line of deep friendships formed over the course of this year. Friends like these are few and far between, or so I used to think -- I have probably made more good friends this year than in my entire twenties. They surround me like cushions, peppering this continent with little conversational havens.


I have left a lot of people behind in my life, especially recently. I like to think that the best ones are glued on, and time has so far proved that to be true. But inevitably, in anyone's life, let alone in one like this, a few of them have to go. I am making my peace with that.


Home is no longer the place I think it is. Friends drift away, connections fade. People have joined the drifts of belongings in my wake. Every time I shift, physically and mentally, there are one or two who move just a little too far away to touch. I realise that it is perhaps emotionally easier for me to reduce my connections over there. But at the same time, never have I felt so completely in my element, never have I attracted so many like-minded people.

Regardless of mental space, I have put myself in a position whereby my main form of contact is email. Despite my sometimes irrational condemnation of technology, I depend on it. If this flow is not maintained, a relationship without deep foundation can dissolve. And thus, without really understanding so at the time, my move away from the UK has inevitably resulted in loss.

I believe I can be easily misunderstood, despite the level of intention I place on my communication. To most, I have run away. To me, I am still running towards. But all I can do is stay true to my own understanding, and keep an open enough mind to allow others in with it.

Everyone has their own path, and everyone has companions who walk it with them.

Those I once counted as part of me may morph into something impenetrable. Those I once trusted may become something else, and this distance might be too big to discover them anew.


But for all the shifting connections that may surround me, right now, in the centre of this torn city, I feel completely safe.


Time is a rate of change. I stand at the window of the mall and look out over the throughway, my eyes tracing cars in bewilderingly straight lines. Streams of traffic and lives blur around me in bright trails, momentarily blinding me.

Home is a moving vehicle

We walk into the controlled climate of a giant shopping centre.


The entire mall is covered in fairy lights. A red- and white-striped signpost cheerily points us towards Santa. Soft clothes, perfectly clean, seem glued on to plastic abstracts of the human form. Things, endless things, surround us.

The colours and smells are overwhelming and I am overcome with the urge to spend money.

My wallet contains four dollars and a few Quetzal, but even if it were full I would be unable to hand it over, paralysed as I am by this incredible shinyness, this impossible choice, the enticements of the advertisements and the lighting confusing me. I am bedazzled to such an extent that I simply follow my friends, wide eyed and silent, an idiot's smile belying my incredulousness.

I may still be in Guatemala City, but in this moment I realise the enormity of the gap between where I am and where I was.

Perspectives contract a huge, incomprehensible world into something small enough to be seen through your own, personal window. Most people spend a lot of their lives looking through the same window again and again, literally and figuratively, because that is what creates solidarity, that is what begets security. That is what makes it easy to do whatever they do; when they decide to look, they know what they will see.

In some ways I wish that would satisfy me. I could look out of my window and feel comfortable. But for whatever reason I was born into this body, a vehicle with an insatiable desire to move. My little eyeholes and my clamouring mind need constant change.

Perhaps this is why I enjoy bus journeys so much. The trouble is, when your window moves so much, a society that has previously seemed so logical can become a virtual reality, a shadowy vista on an endless road. And one day, you look back... and the concrete of a previous life is just candy canes and bottled smells, processed cheese and flimsy, pointless garments.

I feel left behind, in a sense. Step off the gravy train and the engine still chugs. Without realising it, I have signed myself out of that world… and not yet found another to sign myself into. Am I looking for something? Or am I just wandering aimlessly, the eternal fool, destined one day to return to a world that has moved far from my comprehension? These are the questions that walk circles in my head.


At the end of the day, although I may feel longing for that home I once had back in England, how many times can I say, "I live here now," before it begins to become true? And when my search for 'realness' over this side of the Atlantic means I meet such a huge concentration of people whom I truly understand, and who truly understand me, then perhaps at some point I do need to consider which world forms the best fit.


At some point, time became more valuable than money. With that choice, my windowframe collapsed. I think about my enormous, past collection of belongings... and I cannot remember where it all went.

For Nico, who talks with his hands

Over a mystical year his hands span my memory.
In a bubble of existence, a blurred reality of growth and subsistence
It was his hands that so often brought clarity.

The fundamentals unwound, broken down
With earnest gesticulation
Hands like starry exclamations, weaving connotations
Unspooling spirals of logic in the air.

Clench contracts possibility
Fist smacks sensibility
Fingers print indelibly
Pulling chewy strings out from under the limbs of poorly-constructed theory
Drawing abstract conceptuality into a thin stream of truth.

His fingers open wide and capture something invisible.

So complex a creature
And yet so perfectly, beautifully succinct.
Strife of mind, search for calm
Expressed in these five lines
Intersecting in a palm.
Like conflicting perceptions, crossing at strange angles
And him
Like a question mark
In the middle.

These hands stand as channels
Visual aid to his stories made in a vault of curiosity and quest
They never rest
They dance with his voice
And with the tiny, telling lines around his eyes.
For this brother is wise with a wisdom borne of thirst
A communication forever bursting from him
His palms outstretched
Imploring me to explore, just a little more
The ideas I take to be true.
"You are my rock here," he said
But he was mine, too.