Caroline Waight

I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore.

I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore.

A horizon is what I want, and I want solitude. Healthy solitude, and I want intimacy, true intimacy. I no longer want to be anyone but myself.

‘I have come here often,’ she writes. ‘A whole childhood, every single day. All these arrivals are false, because in reality I was born here. Here I can do nothing but return.’

But that’s just one side of the coin, Kerstin, I think. The other is this: the place you come from is not somewhere you can ever return. It no longer exists, and you have become a stranger. Too urbanized, too acculturated, too loud to assimilate, but all identity is formed in the schism.