Alive

I’ve always held certain truths inside me; things that I was never told but innately 'knew'. For instance, I 'knew' I would love nothing and nobody but knowledge and books, and I’d grow old in a safe and dusty cocoon, pushing future spectacles up my nose with a print-stained finger. I would shun society in favour of the vast imaginary worlds I would create
and commit to the page, time and time again. It was best that way, I knew. That was the end game. That was the life that would suit me best. I’d be respected, and above all clever. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

Today, I’m glad nothing turned out as planned, as expected. How else could I have known what Bath looks like from above as you tumble down the hill in a breath-billowing cloud? It is an enchanted sky; sometimes the colour and texture of smoke-suffused jet, other times coy and whimsical, story-book cornflower blue with a faint blush of peachy-rose. By day,
it is the green and wholesome dream of the romantic poet, all smooth mounds and hills, full mauve-grey trees and noble golden stone. At the first wintered whisper of evening, a veil of indigo falls and mutes and softens all; the streetlights glow in sparks of amber, panoplies of tiny fairy jewels. A ruby pulses; a sharp emerald dances alone, pushing back
the velvet blackness at the end of some invisible, far-off dock. A beacon. A signal. To whom it may concern.

Today I take the lights as mine. I’m here and I’m alive and I can be something, someone more than the spinster in her cave, in her self-imposed exile. Today there was a tangible thread of something better than fiction, something tight in my grasp, and I’m holding it as I
follow it down into the silver-white heart of the city. If I write it here, in my footsteps, in my words, I won’t forget it; this moment will not be lost.  

Today, I am alive.