Looking Forward

This is the view from the airport after dropping off Sam on his way to a fortnight's school excursion in Vietnam. Sounds a fantastic thing to do. Most of the best moments of my life were travelling, and there hasn't been enough of it the past ten years. Before the kids were born, before life took a giant detour forever, I decided to work for a year to save enough money to keep moving and I'm still working all this time later. He alternated between feeling sad sick and lonely and almost loopily happy, optimistic, the stream of good times in the air and the fabric of things.

The city had evolved away from him. Now was not the time for talking. The people he had cared about, the times he had cared about, were long gone. Each day a fresh layer of crystalline ice was coated across the city's social circles; and the bars transformed, and the ones that had died, everyone was too young to remember them. But he had been sent, or left, to watch.

The artistry sometimes failed. Good stories were overlooked. Fear tightened in the corridors. Time scaped out. His skin crawled. There was no way out. But the sun shone on the bells of yellow flowers at the back door, and the light played up across the walls. And he was not in crisis. For that, small mercies.