She was so excited, you know. The morning air waking her eyes, the chill with a promise of sun. She went to work that day, just for the morning then she left. Her colleagues wished her well and all through the hours that she worked she thought. She went over the folded clothes she’d packed away. She ticked through the documents in her bag. It sat waiting for her on the bed in the light that moved across the duvet, to noon, to the closing of doors.

Her friend was coming to pick her up, to take her and drop her with bags and she was ready. Changed and brushed, bristling with expectation with the possibilities in front of her.
And she stood, she could see it all from where she sat now, where she had stood and the bluster of the docks caught her scarf, it spiralled up around her face, out of control in the gust. Everything was new, strange, bearings to find, sea legs to attach and she thought of her friend who had worked there. He was clear and vivid in his absence and she imagined him grinning – and his laugh.

She was there, you know. She could see her, hair burbling upwards, a thin top because that’s all she would need and she was light. She felt herself sparkle at the edges, like a fraying blanket that comforted in its age. The ends of her pulsed and danced, waves of photons twirled around her and she was free. My God, she was so free.

And in that place, high up over the water shine she was wrapped. She was swaddled in the things she needed and the people who formed her life.
There had never been a moment like it, not that she could recall, where every cell in her form crackled and sparked and she was at the start of something. Her laugh was lifted up by the eddies, carried high in gushing thermals, through the gulls until it it broke. Sound waves scattering fragments of her into the day, into the swell of her world.

And she was there. And she stood. And she could feel every throb in her body as she sits now, cold, looking out towards the window. Wrapped in a parka to shield her from the day. The condensation moving sluggish down the pane, her view blurring through the droplets. And in each burst of water she sees herself, reflected, smiling back. Caught in time, in motion. in that place – when she was who she used to be.

Back there. She stood – she was alive.