Your battered and bulging leather case, your sweater I can smell and feel on my own bare arms even now. With us on the platform were sometimes many others, sometimes only a few, but always we found each other with the same brief intensity: every reunion a miracle, a restoration. The gasp of home. You carried a local delicacy each time in your bag, some small, chosen gift, a stone, an apple, flowers, a photograph, transposed hundreds of miles, as if you would bring a bit of your earth to me each meeting, as if, over the months, you would bring your place to mine, one handful at a time.

Impossible now to think of train travel without a kind of tenderness – as if that is what love is: arrival after arrival. And the same dark truth: the solitary place we arrive from each time.