Written July 2024
On the rainy train home and I’ve crossed this way so many times before, that the lull and motion unravels thoughts before they form. I like journeys, I like window seats, I like moving between one home and another like a power-line taught between two posts. There I am strung. I know I am high-strung, I know I am wrought and stretched out but sometimes that is worth bearing if I can both know and be known— here and there, there and here.
The phrase scorpion wind only sounds absurd if you haven’t experienced July rain in a paper thin skirt, stalking down Kings Parade to the station. The wind indeed seems hostile, cutting my cheeks with lukewarm knives. I should blame myself for wearing the skirt, but I’ve always been a sucker for immediately wearing the clothes that people gift me, no matter the weather. It feels like I’m carrying them with me, disarming any terrain with familiarity’s small comforts. Yet this cannot shield me— the scorpion wind stings me still.
I feel like I often live in a cluster of moments, jumping from one to the next, never quite figuring how I end up where I do. Life moves past me over the surface of water whilst my head remains under, and then, once in a while, I my rear head up and break the surface. I stop incubating breath in my chest and take a great big inhale. It is as my life is trapped under my finger for just a moment of self-consciousness or self-acknowledgement, before the current of time snatches me away from myself once more.
Maybe I am speaking in fractures, but I do not know how to string these fleeting sensations together whilst I’m atop moving wheels, on endless tracks, the bleary July landscape zipping past me. It occurs to me that I’m constantly on a train, as I watch my life pass in a stream of blurred fields and towns caught behind the rain-pebbled window. I stop at stations with quaint and equally ridiculous names only to take stock of who and where I am. My breath plumes on the window because no matter the season, the journey’s always cold. I am not sure I’ll ever know the next station, but like Cambridge and London, I’m strung between my beginning and end. The train moves my body home.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my words.
Zaynub <3
