The loss of light seems to speed up at this time, or to happen imperceptibly, so that suddenly the evening feels shrouded in it: the mystery at the heart of every cycle of time. The folding of darkness, covering and concealing, like the tracks I follow, onwards into lost time, caught in their own circle ... And now I sense how the city crosses into the tracks, and the tracks blend into the city.
I sit there making plans. A train ride to the city by the coast, I spend a few hours sitting by the docks and watching boats come and go. I can’t shake this stillness, this silence. I am apart, and everything is happening around me. I buy a ticket for a boat, the overnight crossing.
It was possible to walk to the end of the viaduct, in dense woodland, at the bottom end of the park near where she grew up. Along the road that skirted the edges of the park, she would crane to see passing glimpses from the window as the car passed by. Just before the steep descent into the valley, when her mind was on other things. Her memory began to fail her as to its exact location. More and more it seemed less likely to be how she remembered.
It can seem bewildering, the sudden onset of night. Alone amongst strangers. In the city with the windows open and the dark falling over us, we can see our lives reflected across to other windows, as images. Lit up in windows we turn off the lights, to be visible shadows only.
The Street Walks In 