The train leant itself into curves I couldn’t see coming. My water shifted in its cup, finding equilibrium, then shifting again while the carriages searched for rhythm on the rails.
Outside, England unfolded in parcels. The embankment fell and unveiled torn plastic bags snagged in hawthorn, a lion etched in the distant hillside, with grazing cows, sheep, then more cows, and the feeling that any parallel highway traffic was racing us to the nearest town. The train hummed a frequency I felt in my sternum before I heard it. We’re not moving through landscape; the landscape is pouring out past us.
Stone walls older than my great-grandmother’s grandmother disappeared at a hundred and twenty five miles an hour. I was fixed there, pinned to my allocated seat, watching centuries of work dissolve into the present tense of motion as the class 805 glided along to my station.
Chester announced itself in red sandstone, the kind that holds rain for days and releases it slowly like breath. The old town walls curve around the centre like my palms did to clay during my first pottery class with Y one week later. Cupped around something fragile, worth protecting. I walked in the afternoon with an old friend, both cheering to ten years as friends that weekend. We explored as the setting sun turned the stone amber, terracotta, the colour of dried blood that has oxidised into rust.
Alive is how the city made me feel. The streets hum. Not with traffic—there’s barely any—but with a frequency I can’t name. It was low but vibrated up through the flagstone, through the low soles of my Barefoot shoes, settling somewhere behind my ribs. Later, I would realise it’s the hum of thickness: stone piled on stone, archways that held their shape for hundreds of years, buildings that remember when they were a fortress, where Romans once walked the worn steps.
We passed those rows and medieval galleries stacked above the shopfronts, timber dark as old tea. There’s something unbearably tender about this place—the persistence of small rituals in a place built to outlast everyone. Where you take the time to watch the shop lady rearranging teacups in her shop window and hear the small clinks of porcelain on glass folding itself into the hum, like part of it’s texture. People walk slow. But if you’ve been to London, you know that’s a welcome difference. Me and L visited contemporary art pop-ups and conversed with artists and baristas alike. We discussed music and health practices and life as it beneath the stacked tudor architecture looking after independent stores of local cold brews and tacos.
This is not my city. I have no claim to these stones, these narrow passageways and steep stairs that turn back on themselves like a maze designed to confuse invaders. But my nervous system softens to it anyway. The thickness of all this history—it is not oppressive. It is permission. Permission to go slow. Permission to be small and temporary in the presence of a place birthed the same year Pompeii and Herculaneum fell to Vesuvius.
I think about staying. Not visiting—staying. What it would mean to wake each morning to the same hum, to let the stones recalibrate my sense of time. Home has always been London, but here I realise that it may not always be.
The hum. I felt it standing between the murmurs and slower tempos of locals synced with the settings of this town. Once passed the square, when the connection between people and place goes deeper. Local police were also alert to it and any changes like I was, albeit for a different reason. I felt it reverb through the centuries-old church and its garden within. This hum is what I love about a town, and it was exactly what I wanted to feel that weekend.
The next day three of us surrounded ourselves in the Welsh forests nearby. It swallows sound the way snow does. We vied to get lost there for a while, traversing off-camber fields and inclines of all kinds. We were three bodies moving through grey that has texture, weight, presence. Visibility dropped to maybe fifty metres. Trees appeared and disappear. The world ended at the edge of sight, but what I could see was all I needed to for now.
The silence was no longer absent. It was presence, pushing against our eardrums, making us aware of our own breathing—something I’d lost for a while. The rustle of autumn leaves around my feet, the small clicks my jaw makes when I swallow. We spoke in half-sentences that trail off while the mist makes speaking at all feel intrusive.
Then, a house. Not a ruin—an abandonment. Before I got there, my right foot found what looked like solid ground and just kept going. The bog took my shoe to the ankle, cold water flooding in immediately and soaking through cotton and skin. My foot’s soaked, and in this weather, it’s the kind of wet that will not dry for hours. I should’ve been miserable, but I’m laughing. Because I do not care even a little bit. Because something in me has loosened so completely that a soaked shoe barely registered as a problem. The bog is just a bog. The wet foot is just wet. And I’m just a body in a forest, laughing, while mist prevents me thinking about the rest of the world.
We arrived. The roof still intact. No glass or doors. Like teenagers, we go inside via the doors and look around the skeleton of this house. Someone might’ve lived here but decided to leave or was forced with no one to inherit the leaving. The forest doesn’t clarify. It’s intriguing nonetheless.
The birds, when they call through the grey, sound like questions I do not have language for. Their songs are not for us. We’re just passing through, leaving footprints—one set deeper and wetter than the others—that the next rain will erase.
For much of those three hours, I forgot about my phone. Not because I decided to—because I forgot it existed.
Back in the world of signal and WiFi, your hands find your pocket every seven minutes or less. Phantom vibrations. The muscle memory of checking. You feel it most acutely in the mornings, that jolt of cortisol. You’re more motivated to reach for your screen before doing anything more important.
We’re expected to handle a thousand things a day now. Messages. Emails. News from twelve time zones. Your grandparents had maybe ten decisions to make in a day. We now have hundreds before lunch.
No previous generation had to maintain this many threads, to context-switch this often and so rapidly, to be available to this many people simultaneously. And we’re supposed to accept this as normal. As the cost of living in the present.
The forest showed me something else. It strips that away and shows us that our nervous system still remembers a different speed. Underneath the buzz of notifications and urgency and low-grade anxiety of being reachable, there is another frequency. Older. Slower. Still intact.
Grounding practice was dearly missed. It’s a week later and I’m with Y and her family in the East Midlands, in a village so quiet you could hear birds from half a mile away. There’s a large garden, bordered by high hedges and pear trees that drop fruit often. The morning is cold and the grass is damp enough to soak through my socks immediately.
I go, take them off first, feeling initially foolish for allowing the cold climb through my ankles. But I get a chair, drag it to the back of the garden as a recommendation, and set it by the border of a field opening up in morning light. The sun is low, typical of 9am light. And it turns everything it touches into its best version.
I sit still, watching my breath make small clouds. Thirty minutes of the pressed grass warming under my feet, morning light, and the weight of my body in a chair. No phone. Not task. My body giving heat to the earth and the earth takes it and somehow trades with something to make me feel more alive and present than I have in many months. This is not meditation or mindfulness. It’s something older than those words; it’s what bodies do when you let them remember they’re not machines.
The journey home was dark, raining, and three hours long. But I kept that same hum in my sternum from the beginning. Now my own pulse, my own frequency, my own drive for change after months of static.
I do not know if this will last. And if it doesn’t, I will be back. It likely won’t survive contact with my regular life. When the phone is inevitably always back in my pocket and the emails are piling up. London waits with its particular velocity and you feel it as soon as you return to the region, with it insisting that standing still and falling behind are alike.
But I take this time as something has shifted. Not resolved. Not fixed. Just, shifted.
It’s no longer about watching things disappear anymore. It’s about watching them arrive.
The sun will rise again tomorrow. It always does.