Spring

It felt like spring today. The air was lighter and smelt different, a bit like laundry on the line after a fabric softener spin cycle. It wasn't completely dark at 5pm, the street lights were only just coming on, cars were slowly creeping along, birds were flying low, so strange in the city. I saw a spider on an external wall. My shadow under the fluorescent supermarket sign was dark, but I knew that I was really covered in light: the light in my eyes, the spark in my brain, the hint of a flame growing in my heart.

I breathed in and it was like everything was new, like a window had been opened and fresh air let in. I thought about the staleness of the grey stagnant air before; the cold, but not-cold-enough heavy days with their rain and their clouds and their stillness. Now the wind had come and blown everything around, upside down and inside-out. I felt inside-out, like you could see what I was thinking. And I don't know what I was thinking, or even who I was, turned into confusion by a 25mph gust of westerly wind. Eventually I became someone else, someone new, someone fading in the half-light in between the sun and the moon.

On days like today, the earth reaches with silent fingers, offering up its treasures. A certain way of looking; the angle of a beam of light. The sound of the spring coming; a sound like jostling or whistling or taking things apart or putting things back together. The sound of a clock pushed forward. The lightness of the air. The breath that keeps on coming, the breath that is taken away.