I remember walking out of the footpath on to the street. It was a freezing afternoon in January, I wasn’t far from the harbour and gulls were wheeling overhead. The sky was that sharp blue you only get in January, brittle and bright like deep ice veined with cirrus. As I walked out on to the road lined with pollarded trees, a route unfamiliar to me but thoroughly ordinary, the low winter light broke over the terraced houses and shone on parked cars, and it was then it came over me.
What followed, like any mystical experience, defies words. It was like all at once I remembered a hundred lifetimes pouring out of those houses. Not memory as recall: memory as nostalgia, a burning, sorrowful, uncontainable love for something all at once familiar and distant, like I had returned to somewhere I knew and cared for deeply but had been away from for a long time, like a shot of deja vu so beautiful no real moment could possibly contain it.
It flicked over me like an aurora, then somebody shuffled by as I stood there, a car passed and it was gone. I was just on a normal street on a normal day walking back to where my car was parked, left with the moment drawn from the fire like a fading coal.
Such moments have happened to me throughout my life, and I consider them among the most important experiences I have ever had. In some…
