The river Avon, somewhere in Wiltshire
The sunrise is stillness. It’s why it’s so easy to remember a morning like this one. You just need to be still and wait for it. You can hear the memories of a sunrise if you listen, thumb back through your index cards of previous sunrises, till you come to the one you’re looking for. In the stillness your other senses come alive and you remember. On this morning it was the tingling of the cold upon the skin, the clear, crisp smell of a morning, before the sun burned off the frost.
Few places have felt like home. This was the first one in ages, but how could you not feel that?
It’s rare that a dream comes true, but that morning was a dream. I was in a world that I could never quite conceive of from photos, from films. You had to breath the air, listen to the silent sound of the sun creeping towards the horizon, the anticipation of that first beam of light, when the frost starts to capture the light and holds it – till it drips from the branches and grass, back into the earth.
In those moment before the sunrise, the branches silhouetted against the lightning sky, nature finds perfection. On this morning, it saw a stranger looking towards a strange sky, and decided to put on a show, to make him feel at home. There’s a part of me there still, waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
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