It was calm, the breeze was fresh and the month left one with their feet somewhere new. It had left mine firmly on the ground in the family home in the north, a place reserved for dreaming of adventures. But something had changed that September and I wasn't dreaming of adventures anymore, adventures that raced across unknown continents as fast as they traced their way across my ceiling as I would lay in bed, hands behind my head, looking up for inspiration and waiting patiently, had disappeared no mater how patiently I waited. Now I had found my adventure, but when we had surfaced, it had left us alone across the vast expanse of that cold, calm water. I lay in my hollow room with the window wide open, as if to let the old dreams of escape come fluttering in, or maybe to try and tempt my own self out. Whatever it was, my adventure stayed firmly put at an unreachable point.
The air was cooler. It's what you expect in September, but for some reason, I hadn't. It felt like the feeling you get when you gain a few hundred feet in altitude from the stifling valley floor in high summer and find the air much cooler than you might have expected up in the high, lonely expanses; the people too, were much smaller.
Certainly that was how I felt that September. It was the day that I saw the cyclist struggling up the hill on his way back from the station, his calves bulging and his back straining against the weight of himself and his backpack and his bike, all conspiring against him with gravity, that I realised I was now on my own, much like the cyclist.
I say on my own because I wasn't alone, I know that, I had never felt such a connection to another human being before. We were meant for one another. We were like the point when an electric storm sends a bolt crashing to earth and connecting to the ground, or better still, the very point where some force of great energy meets in the sky, sending forth huge sparks and tidal waves of rolling sound. We were hard-wired together, that was for sure, meant to be, but God, we were so far apart. Electricity can jump distances, and if you had ever seen us walking down the street, you would have seen the force we generated, felt the hairs stand up on the back of your neck and probably whispered to yourself something like, 'jeez, I've never seen something like that before.'
We saw on the peoples' faces and we were smug about it, but we flew too close to the sun and, God, electricity can jump, but we were so far apart.
Each of us was trying to keep afloat in the calm waters of that September sea, something so easy when we were together was so difficult apart. No longer were we pieces of driftwood, not caring where we were going, now, under the he placid waters, we were kicking furiously to where we wanted to go.
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