Snow reminds me of home. No matter how long I have lived here, no matter how much I love England, I still don’t feel right here. Things taste and smell wrong. But snow blurs things; the lines between worlds. It smudges time like a thumbrint on charcoal.

And then I am in two places at once. Looking out into my garden and being lifted onto my father’s shoulders so I can see the snow on the roofs. Walking to work but also walking in a different place, with fir trees and hills you can zoom down on, on your sled. Smelling the frost on my father’s coat, having snowball fights.

Loss walks with me, always has. I resign myself to my two worlds, but I long for the one I cannot have. Winter brings out my melancholy. Yearning increases with the dying of the light. And I long most of all, to undo myself for a while. Stop time for a sleep and dream of what I’ve lost. The sea, the fields, the land I belonged in. My father.

I love the life I have, and the people I have in it. But I think I would be happiest if every once in a while – a couple of days a month perhaps, I could simply unexist myself for a while. Dissolve into light, into air. Become something stark and ordinary. The shadow of a tree, the flight of crows.