When Two Worlds Collide
On an October sun streaked day travelling the Tarka Line, a rural track that runs through miles of patchwork coloured pasture and wetland marsh, my mind drifted to a town I had never seen; somewhere in what once was an industrial wasteland.
And he, seemed an impossibility on this journey I had taken so many times before, where herons stand like towering overlords in spotted-trout inhabited shallows, respectfully keeping kept their distance.
Except, for a brief moment in the comfort of a clanking carriage, I looked up from my magazine to see, a bird of prey flying alongside the window its eyes etched with angst, or so I thought, firmly fixed on me.
So strange this scene, this magnificent creature so out-of-place, keeping pace along the polished steel rails, its flight feathers so close I could see the details, until the bridge up ahead where it and I parted company.
And as I was delivered into the depths of the tunnel, my thoughts soared to a man in Middlesbrough, some three hundred and sixty miles away. A man attuned to nature and the call of the wild, who like the buzzard I had left behind, had made an indelible impression on the wall of my mind.
I could not have known that someday, not too far into the future, our eyes would meet on a distance platform and that he and I would become lovers. Or, that whenever we were apart, I would look to the skies and spy a hawk hovering overhead, tracking me.
Copyright© Talia Hardy. 2012.
