The world begins to close in as I return from the old paths and the long meadows.
Stacked bricks and shimmering glass reflect the bright May morning. The tarmac’s softening and the traffic’s beginning to choke the main arterial routes of the city. I’m moving steadily up the steps that thread their way to the top of the steepest hill in the city. At the brow, the remnants of a Roman tower look out across a wide and ancient valley, the river below hemmed in by renovated warehouses and new build blocks of flats. Some of the oldest buildings in the country butted beside prefab constructions, their plastic trims playing with garish and artificial colour. My legs are heavy, breathing labored as I crest the top and pick up pace along one of the old drove roads that’s marked the route to market for more than a millennia.
But I’m not heading into the city. I have nothing left to give. It’s time to go back. The weekend rush hour is steadily building, early morning shoppers, scrambling for a parking space. There’ll be movement inside by the time I reach the front door. A stirring in the nest.
Off the main roads again, I take the long way round. Avoiding direct traversal of the door. I’m not ready to be seen yet. I’m not fully prepared. Ducking down the alleyways and the passages that thread the estate I reach an archway that leads out to the green stretch of land around which the houses and flats have are carefully arranged. Later, with Saturday shopping in full flow, people will pour through here. Watched from our living room windows, unseen.
Stopping in the cool shadows beneath the archway I stretch. Shoulders, arms, through the hips and down to my tired legs. Sweat rings the neckline of my shirt, the half zip open allowing a furious heat to escape. And beneath my backpack I can feel hotspots where something has caught and rubbed gently, persistently and unknowingly through layers of skin, exposing the rawness beneath. Finding a chink in my armour. Finding a piece of me. Later, I’ll pay for my lack of lubrication with bedsheets stuck fast to broken, oozing flesh. But for now it feels like something well earned. A badge. A mark.
I feel the door pulling me towards it. There’s a transition happening. From movement, from flow, from being oblivious to anything but the sensation of moving through the world and feeling all it’s life around me. To static, stoic silence. To targets and objectives and needs and things that must be done. I take a moment longer, trying to process the miles in my head, grasping for the kernel of the experience before it slips into a blur of impressionistic blues and greens and the grey of the tarmac ahead. And at the same time the door is calling me forward. Insistent now. I am becoming that other. Transforming. Changing.
My world closes in around me. I approach the door, head bowed. And all the chaos inside.