On a train leaving Aberystwyth

-Olivia Burgess

If only we could make the move, love:

I always needed a back-up plan.

Betjeman follows me around town, alluding to my silhouette,

more content to sit in the hollow of my laugh or the river

dappling the ice blockade. A train station sits in the middle of nowhere

with nothing but a supermarket chain baggie to guard it.

The lone sheep. The vulnerable belly of the sea

where it slithers on sand to form a creek, stalling the tide

under patient pall of permanent autumn, a kiss of winter.

I could see myself laid up on this hillside, couldn’t you?

Affixed. Up here, I need not concern myself, my warbling being,

completely boundless, unlearning the words ‘graduate scheme’,

‘career connections’ or ‘employability’. Tether me to the shadow-bellied clouds

where everyone but nobody could have the chance to know my name.

My new dream is to consciously abandon –

all humane, but deliberate, bidding farewell to these supple ambitions that

lie in my bed like new wives writhing with biblical temptation, the crook of a fingernail,

the come hither of it all, no, no more. I am unafraid and lonely, and I will be fine

with kissing it on the forehead and saying goodbye. I will burn the notebooks

in an ethical manner and find the perfect grass circle to tie myself into, begging

for it to understand me even if our finite bodies reside on the opposition. The moon moves.

I unlearn my name. How could one be scared of appearing large or overbearing

when these hills appear the most peaceful beings alive? To know both the truth

of silence and its comfort. To envelop an entire cloud and not having to ask

over and over and over: is this enough? Am I fulfilled? Can I finally cease this needless craving?

Olivia Burgess is a word chef meandering in and out of London. More can be found on her own Substack, 'Olivia's Cave'.