The horizon was a suggestion in the dark. Casinos brightly lit stand planted with their feet in the French Riviera, and with your back to them the Mediterranean stretches endless into the night. The horizon was only a suggestion, tonight.

The water was a real nighttime blue. The kind of grey that holds colour but cannot conceal it, as if the very essence of blue were sighing in the waves. Little waves, and all on pebbles. Our feet sank into these, rumbled over them like the waves of a river, and all around us the lights of Nice illuminated the air we breathed.

I was put in mind, tonight, of a passage from the train south:

I will not take a picture,
what could a photo say
of our passage, like a knife
slicing through the grey.

The fog is gath’ring ’round us
on the winsome hazy day
that we leave Paris behind and
roll on endless, far away.

Too far, I cry, from your cold arms,
too far from your cold lips.
And too far will this cold train ride,
a knife through my heart slipped.

Isn’t it funny how sometimes a thing will come to you, fully formed. It will step forward and say “hello, it’s my turn now,” and you don’t know its story, all you can do is say “okay, yes, it’s your turn now.”