It’s Not the Arrival

Whatever it is we breathe these days is finally running out, and it’s time for savouring each taste as if it was the finest wine. I’m getting moss and mushrooms, sweet black tea served perilously hot on a train traversing contested terrain. Between each sharp hit, I cleanse my palate with filtered rainwater and a wafer pressed from harsh truths about lives lived on the wrong tracks. There’s a saying from somewhere, that if you catch the wrong train, you should get off at the first station, because the longer you stay on, the more expensive it is to return; but I’ve been on here for maybe forty years – or it might be a hundred and forty years, because the timetables are printed in a script I wasn’t taught at school – and there hasn’t been a station, and I don’t have any money anyway, because my pockets are full of moss and mushrooms. When the guard arrives, his grey uniform and grey face wrinkled like a discarded love letter, I try to explain that I have no ticket, that I don’t know where I’m going, and that I don’t even remember boarding, but my lips are blistered and, besides, we don’t speak the same language. It’s ok, he gestures with his hands and his eyes, and his face is the low Sun over melting ice. Just keep breathing.

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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor

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