Train-Ride

Then there was that train journey back, all blue, darkening skies and slight sunsets. Reading a book of ghost stories I had bought in some ramshackle book shop in hastings, kept glancing out of the window. Watching the odd wastegrounds drift by in the swelling twilight. Bits of water and broken down caravan. These are places no-one goes, and these scrubby moors then replaced by tangled patches of spindly trees. Too small, too secret to be called a wood. Their bark was cold, their skin like this winter extending into spring. Andy, Claire and Al got off at Lewes and because I'm at work today I returned to Brighton. The train came in a different way to the trains from London, and there was a moment of wondrous panic when an unfamiliar view of Brighton made it seem not like Brighton. It felt, for a second, that I had missed my stop, or I was on a wrong branch line, and I was entering some new and unnamed city at the very last edge of twilight. I looked down onto the city from the viaduct; all those secretive streets, a labyrinth to get lost in, to vanish in, but the train pulled into the main station and it shifted back into being Brighton again.