A matter of life and death

It’s always a slightly disconcerting experience walking through the places in which you spent your youth. Especially when you haven’t lived there for 20 years. After 6 hours on trains and in stations, I opt to walk from the station to my parents’ house and allow the echoes of days gone by to wash over me. Some are tinged with melancholy, others as present as this very moment. Time has a way of converging in ground zero. There’s a church yard to my right, up above the bus shelter I’ve caught a thousand buses from. All those graves and leaves, but no quiet. No quiet because there’s a teenage lad on a shitty motorbike, buzzing around the church and the paths between the graves.

There’s something I adore about this juxtaposition of the silence of death, and the vibrancy and antagonism of youthful expression. It’s primal and essential and it’s happening above ground and I love how life finds a way.