I am walking home, weighed down with plastic bags that cut through my fingers like cheese slicers. Somehow they're filled to the brim with a weeks worth of shopping for £10.
On this heat worn and frayed, summer day, I'm sixteen years old and thinking, "however did country girl me ever come to be living in the middle of this strange city?"
Home is a two storey terrace shared with 5 unconnected, disconnected souls displaced in one place for a transitory period. Almost feels like a sentence we've been given, to share this one cell for and allotted time before one leaves and another inmate arrives to replace. I have discovered that one face becomes another too easily in a city.
Sometimes it seems I could be in Turkey, North Africa or even Jamaica depending upon which side of the street I'm on. Yardy boys at plantain stalls, women draped in black, serene, guarded, silent, men smoking roll ups in pool rooms and the ever lingering smell of kebabs and hot oil.
Disorrientation fills the air with a thousand unnamed voices giving different directions to the right bus I need to take home.
The heavy air of traffic clogged streets in summer time and the swirling synthetic rainbows of rain laced with petrol turns my thoughts to fog...
Two years later and I'm on the brink of leaving for another country all together.
During the intermission of this "time between", too many lines have been written, scenes been played out, lines spoken and hurts, rehashed, re-played and re-enacted on this stage.
Now all I want to desperatly do is hide in the wings for one night. Curl up into the nothingness of annonimity.
So I travel toward the heart of the city. Following the clogged ateries, mainlines and thread veins of skinny streets, pumping, faster and faster, harder and harder as I get closer to the center.
Convulsing like the strobe lights that seep from darkened doorways as stars begin to dissolve into the orange glow of street lamps.
I'm pregnant, but I don't know it yet.
Exsausted, I find myself sitting on the steps of west end musical stage show on the cusp of an evening's performance.
I hear the clink of shoes on cobble, I smell the static of excitement in foreign voices. French vowels bubble up from the dank and drenched tarmac like champagne.
It is raining heavily and I have no place to go.
I close my eyes and try to find a small corner of quiet.
My ears have throbbed with the noise of this city for so long I hear the conversations between taxi cabs and Double Decker buses in my dreams.
Slowly it comes into view....
The outline of a tree in the distance, branches tanned golden in the sun, bark gilded and shivering, leaves trembling.
It seems too far away to be real. I begin to squint, as I dare to look up a little.
Clouds part mutly. Beneath them the sky is powder blue, it seems to roll out forever.
Somewhere in the far away, I hear a child laughing and some long grass brushes against my legs as I walk.
Then, without warning, I feel a hand on my shoulder.
I turn abruptly, defensive, instinctivly.
No, no one is moving me on this time, this hand simply rests, and waits...
I don't know who it is who gently rests their hand and speaks my name.
One day years from now I will understand. Recognise the voice who called me away that day.
In the white noise of dislocated memories and fears, manifested by what I thought would numb them. A cold sea of concrete, a pavement fractured and scarred, covered with a liquid neon ointment.
Somehow I heard.
Somehow I stumbled
to my feet that day
and followed.
And somehow, now, I find myself sitting beneath tree, that was once nothing but the small seed of His hope, the echo of His voice, in my heart.
Branches tanned golden in the slender sunlight of late summer.
The storm clouds dissolved a long time ago in the blue transparency of this sky of hope. Endless, limitless, boundless, eternal...
I hear a child laughing, now two, now, three, now four.
And the sound heals the wounds that tears once furrowed. Eroding saltwater, carved out a hollow for freshwater to pool.
And I drink long drafts of thankfulness.
All the while as the long grass brushes against my legs while I walk.
I still feel that hand on my shoulder.
Thank you Lord for Summer memories ,Each cherished moment in which to linger with my children,
The words of friends who encourage with their courage. And give me the courage to share too.
Thank you Lord, for taking my hand towards future life that heals the wounds of the past.
And the wonder of now,
Thank you for the miracle within the small seed of your own hope which you plant in hearts.
It can even grow a "forever home" where trees and blue skies and sunlight emerge from the debris of dreams of a once lost and homeless girl.
