Friday 16th January. am
He woke before the house did. The hour sat lightly on the rooms, the sort of hour that doesn’t announce itself. His mother slept. The Airbnb guest slept. The dog was not yet with him. He stood at the bay window and let the day arrive without interpretation. Roofs, a rinsed sky, the far-off hum of the motorway—movement everywhere, but not here. He noticed the difference. How motion could happen without arrival. How people could be in a place and not be there at all. Earlier in the week he’d watched men in lycra bolt uphill, talking as if tethered to an invisible machine. Healthy, yes—but absent. The body doing, the mind elsewhere. He felt the faint grief of it, not judgement, just the ache of contact missed. The hum of traffic before six came back to him. All that early movement to shift things from one container to another so other things could be had. He felt the sadness of it—the endless doing that keeps the machine upright and fear fed. He prayed quietly that peace would be allowed ...