Everyday Epiphanies

The 4 AM drive to the airport. A half moon peering over the night, like a white face above a wall of dark; a red star high up; the big-brushed fox startled into flight across the street; the young couple kissing in the flare of headlights, leaning into each other and against a wheelie bin.

The flat plain of Essex sprinkled with lights in the black; tendrils of mist wavering over the road in the arc of the headlights; a vast white stretch limo on the opposite carriageway, heading back from some London night out; the empty sweep of the motorway under the grainy amber lights.

Night fading up into dawn; the first jet's white lights rising like a bright star against slashes of silhouette clouds; the sky slowly turning milky, grey, blue. A scattering of dew-shiny cars under the car park's towering lamps.

In the terminal, realising how everyone looks so much...better at the airport: how the imminence of departure and separation, and the proximity of sudden, fiery death humanise us, individualise us; make us aware, painfully late, of the fragile envelopes of love we live inside. Sitting alone at a metal-topped table, drinking strong coffee, you think about your loved ones, and about how you'll miss them; and always, always in the stillness and silence, she - the beloved - seeps into life bit by bit, suffusing your consciousness in poignantly vivid memories and untouchable details; the unattainable one who would make it all all right, who would make everything fall into place if only you could be with her for ever.

Sun up. Vast fields of golden light and glare in the sky and on the newly-lit earth; cables of mist spanning the still-shadowed valleys like suspension bridges; smudges of smoke or steam rising from freshly-harvested farms, bakeries, light industrial complexes; the dazzle of the sun in the wing mirror; the sudden cool shadows in the motorway cuttings; fat-bodied aircraft taking off into the vast sky, following each other in a standard climb up into the light, where their curved bellies flash white as they turn into the sunlight.

Slicing past the articulated lorry crabbing along in the inside lane, your body momentarily in tune with your gears, steering wheel, and indicator control stalk; the unconscious consultation of the mirrors, the split-second-perfect judgement of your smooth lane changes. The hills, grain elevators and electricity pylons vivified with early morning light; the sense that life - the whole world of senses, and textures, and contours, and light - could fall together in the right way - slot together with the solidity and rightness of a familiar song's scintillating, soaring chorus.

Regret: thinking back over your life and realising how those vivid times of emotional richness and deep, deep emotional engagement are so few, like jewelled islands of colour and intensity in a dusk-grey sea of habit and drift. And how love - especially love - makes those times glow with potential, and electricity, and hope. And how, even when you're on one of those islands, there's a bit of you that's half-expecting to have to put out to sea again at any moment, back out into that featureless, miserable gloom. And how different life could look if you only ever saw the island, and didn't think about that grey sea.