In the Backseat

I like spending days travelling.

Inside the van, there open up gaps in everyday reality and you get fleeting glimpses at a different life, one in which time is unified and space itself - in the form of a changing landscape, with the light growing and then decaying into milky darkness - flows by you outside. Stories are told, stories big and tragic like the stuff of fiction but taken out of the fabric of reality. Revelations are made without even flinching - there can be no secrets in this movable world. In some intuitive way, we all notice that life is a blink of an eye, and there is an urgency to share all those experiences we feel as uniquely ours, those which we feel contain the core clues to the mystery of our own identity.

The backseat is a parenthesis.

And outside the landscape flows. The most beautiful moments are sunrise and sunset, when it somehow seems that the world might turn out a million different ways. The dawn is grey: before the sun rises, objects seem translucent. Then, colour blooms into the world and fleshes itself out throughout the day, ever-changing. The outside scenery suggests indefinite memories of things that don't belong to you but to the universe of human experience: longing and loss are contained in the van's unstoppable motion forward, a reminder of the constant mutability of our lives.

A sense of possibility, above all, awaits you at the backseat, when you're exhausted and hungry and your body is broken but you carry on speaking and looking people in the eyes as if that was moving the van, and, in that way, moving the whole world.