Storm clouds circled overhead, yet no storm came. The sun threatened to break through, only to retreat again, peering out occasionally without ever risking full exposure.
It gave the valley an unsettled air. Shrouded in mist, it seemed trapped in limbo, its immediate future, at least, uncertain.
The fields, scorched and clinging to life only weeks before, were turning green again. But just as a fake tan conceals pale skin, is this transformation any more than a temporary coating?
In that moment, these surroundings meant everything to me. They mean everything again now, as I write this. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is real. Nothing is serious. Everything merely skims the surface while we propel the world towards its own oblivion.
Mum later tells me about a body found on these moors. The poor soul had died of malaria. I do not know for certain, but I imagine he was a soldier returning from the Second World War. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Some reward for survival. I pictured him finally surrendering to the fever, the chills and the exhaustion, collapsing against a tree as his strength deserted him.
Does that tree still stand and, if it does, which one is it?
I wandered further until I emerged onto the main street, such as it is, where mum lived as a child. There I found myself thinking about hopes, dreams and ambitions. And about reality.
Should we ever be encouraged to dream?
When people told me not to overreach as a child, were they protecting me from disappointment, or projecting disappointments of their own? Were they people whose ambitions had failed to materialise, leaving them burdened by some quiet condition of regret that probably has a name these days?
Highs and lows. Climb and descend? Go over the top? Or simply see out your time in the valley? I am still not sure I know the answer, if there even is one.
I know the answers to some other questions, though. Time grants you that, particularly if you spend long enough overthinking your life. Time, and circumstance. The circumstances of others too.
They are not necessarily the answers I want, so I find myself compelled to write a different ending to the story. What story? Whose story? Mine?
I want it to be all our stories, but I am not sure everyone wants to hear them. Most people would rather avoid that reality. Perhaps because it is not really theirs. And why should it be? That is not for me to decide.
I am not the God who shaped this valley, but perhaps writing gives that illusion, that fleeting sense of authority. You decide where people go, what happens to them, where you leave them, and how their story concludes.
But what happens after The End? After all our endings?
The storm clouds will continue to surrender to sunshine, before gathering once more. The cycle will repeat itself until there is no sky to frame these images. And the lives of those who chose never to climb from the valley, and of those who ventured over its rim, for better or worse, will remain exactly as they have always been.