It is early July.
This summer has been particularly hot already and much of the grass is dry and brittle on the ground.
The corn blanketing so much of the county is already turning golden and it fills the warm breeze with a sweet smell that prompts me to breathe in deep and savour the day.
This time last year I was packing away a home that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would remain broken for much of the next twelve months. In the heady glow at the start of the season I left Cornwall, a place in which I had embedded myself over the course of nearly a decade, and moved back to the county of my childhood. Here I have waded through drifts of crispy autumn leaves and been frozen in by weeks of ice and snow before this last baking month has set in. The world has turned another cycle and I have made it through some of the most dark and turbulent days of my life.
Essex was a place I had been eager to leave behind when I was looking at universities. I ran away beyond the mountains in Wales, and then to the crags and coves of Falmouth. I drifted in the salt air through victories and failures, through extraordinary events and the delicious mundane routines that can set us into a mostly happy settled life. But I was one half of two ambitious minds and this pleasant rut we had dug ourselves into was a rut nonetheless.
We fought hard together at first. And eventually we fought for different things…and for a good time I didn’t realise that this was the case. We both had enough ignorance of the situation, or at least hope that it was not as bad as all that to make a big change. I packed everything into vans and migrated closer to him, I doubled back to base. Alas, there aren’t always happy endings to good beginnings.
I am not at the end of this journey by a long way, this broken homecoming. But I have enough distance from some of it to begin to begin to pick apart and tell the story of what it is to come Home after such a long time away. To tell the story of what gets lost and what gets found, what remains the same and what changes.
This(book)will read like a map of this last year, of where I was when things happened and where I am arriving in the present. I hope it demonstrates the power of love in all its guises and encourages hope and tenacity in others that are walking a similar path. Each chapter will describe a month then and now building a chart of the tale using the best, and most tonic, logic I have found in such a maelstromic situation, time.
It ticks on. The world changes around me, and I change the world around me.
It is early July. Again.