like my veins

I am moving.

I am sitting in my car, a vessel, not a status symbol. The kind of car that says: “Let’s go where you’ve been meant to go, all along.” It smells of salt air and fennel, has sand in the footwell from some untouched cove, books on the backseat, a scarf on the passenger side.

And me. I move.

No fixed itinerary. I go because I can [doesn’t this sentence sound about right?].

I stop where it feels right.

I read under trees whose names I don’t know.

I write in cafés whose menus I don’t understand but whose coffee is exactly what I need.

I eat grilled fish, fresh and simple, next to the sea where it was caught.

I keep moving, like the tide; like Artemis, always on the edge of the wild. I go south, following the coast.

And then this vision begins to mingle with other threads: ideas from the past, dreams of a future I am still inventing, scents of a place I haven’t been to but already ache for.

That’s the sign I am dreaming true.

Because the soul doesn’t dream in straight lines. It dreams in spirals.

It weaves desires not into steps but into currents.

So the question isn’t where do I go.

It’s: what do I follow?

The hunger? The scent? The whisper? The warmth?

And if I follow that [without explaining it to anyone], what begins to form under my feet?

Where am I, let’s say... three stops into the journey?

That coastline.

That wind-scraped, salt-heavy, myth-thick line of earth meeting sea.

I start in Bangor, where the stone holds ancient echoes and the mountains remind me of what I have endured. And then, I go south. I don’t even call it “leaving.” I call it following. Following the coast like a ribbon unspooling from the spool of everything that ever held me back.

I follow where the cliffs lean into the sea like they’re listening. I follow where gorse grows feral and golden. I follow stories that smell like seaweed and burnt butter and old woodsmoke from a nearby fire I didn’t light but were always meant to sit beside.

I stop in small towns. Aberdaron. St Davids. Tenby. I write in pubs and small cafés along the coast where the tables are covered in checkered plastic cloths. On piers. In a parked Volvo with the windows down and my legs up on the dashboard. I write, still wearing my drenched wetsuit, because the words were brought by Neptune and dissolve in salty waters and slip away. I write and watch the sea until I don’t need a language for it anymore.

And then I cross into Cornwall, where the rocks grow stranger, more shaped by old gods and older women. I pass through Padstow, down to Porthcurno, and maybe even to the Lizard, where everything feels a little off-map and still very new [and also seen so many other times before...]. I eat fish pulled in that morning, and people speak to me like I have always lived there because we understand the language of the sails. I meet someone, or maybe not. Maybe the sea is enough company.

But I am not running.

I am living.

This is a pilgrimage of reclamation. No saints. No flagellation. No borrowed gods. Just the body, the breath, the road, the tide. I am in no hurry at all.

I write.

I write about smells, texture, rocks and blades of grass sticking out like belonging to buried knights in friable sandstone, with no compromises. I write about nature doing her thing, no matter how much we try to suffocate her. I talk to Neptune, and he mirrors my dreams back. I tell him of a pub with a warm room, and there it is, just round the next cove. I speak to Artemis in the afternoon while lounging under a tree, and with Hekate late at night, when she lits up my lips, still salty and craving other lips. I speak to Saturn in the morning, when I am planning my day over breakfast, doodling on a map.

These are my days, in shades of dark distant blues: like waves of other shores, like my car, like my veins.

mgt

19JUL25