North Sea

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.

‘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.’

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 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.