I am swept away on a tide that I can’t quite name, but that is full of work and screens and worry and floundering. I look back to the shore where things glint tantalisingly, things like books and days off and trees and the warm solstice breeze and fat raindrops and calm heartbeats. But this swell pulls me and I can’t escape it, until it spits me out, bedraggled, who knows when.

But the tide has energy. It has future. It has determination and as the waves swell, I swell with them, something building and bursting and I ride that hope and put my all into it. Frothing, tired, exhilarated, full of possibility. Full of the anticipation of the drop. The wave break. The gut wrenching fall. Maybe it will come, maybe my wave will make it to shore. I don’t know.

But as I ride the wave, in the background, behind the relentless grey cloud, solstice approaches. The hint of light at 11pm calling come outside, come and dance in the eternal dusk. The 3am grey lightening, that heady earth smell, the stretch of the trees to the midsummer. The thrum of the building energy, calling to me from the shoreline. I watch, from my wave. I wait on tenterhooks.