The Black Swan

For Max.

It was a different station tonight. A fire at my usual stop had rerouted everyone, depositing us somewhere I’d only ever passed through.

The last light lingered in the sky, but it wasn’t the sunset that stopped me.

It was the air.

It wrapped itself around me the moment I stepped onto the platform—thick, heavy and almost oppressive, still holding the day’s heat. The scent of warm hay and sun-baked earth hung in the darkness, so heady it was almost intoxicating.

Before I’d even reached my car, thirty years had disappeared.

Growing up beside the Pacific, evenings were perfumed with salt, kelp and fog. University was my first experience of inland summer nights, where darkness carried not the ocean but fields, harvests and warm earth.

It was the scent of a world I’d only just begun to discover, when possibility felt endless and everything seemed to be opening.

Standing there, thousands of miles from home, time folded in on itself.

It wasn’t just the scent.

It was the memory of an insatiable hunger to devour every experience life placed before me—with my whole heart and without hesitation.

I hadn’t felt that in years.

Then came my Black Swan.

Perhaps we all have one—that unexpected moment that divides life into a before and an after.

Part of me wishes mine had never arrived.

It reminded me that I was still capable of a depth of yearning I’d mistaken for something that belonged only to my younger self.

For years I’d come to believe this was simply what adulthood was.

You build a good life. A marriage. A career. Friendships. Purpose.

The edges soften.

The urgency gives way to routine.

You tell yourself that contentment is enough.

Perhaps it is.

That was the gift.

It was also the grief.

I’d built a life I loved. I thought I’d finally outgrown the part of me that believed I wasn’t enough.

But some wounds don’t disappear.

They simply grow quiet enough for us to mistake their silence for healing.

I’ve often thought about Charles Bukowski’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. Cass spends her life convinced that if people truly saw her, they would leave.

I’ve always understood her.

Because some part of me still fears that if people get close enough, they’ll realise I’m not who they hoped I’d be.

My Black Swan simply revealed that fear had never really left.

It had been waiting in the quiet.

Tonight, as I thought , once again, far too much about my Black Swan, I could feel the tears beginning to rise as I pulled into my driveway.

I opened the front door.

Before they could fall, Woody was there, his whole body twisting with joy simply because I’d come home.

It struck me then that the moments that shape us rarely arrive the way we expect.

Sometimes they come in the scent of warm hay on a summer evening.

Sometimes in an old wound that reminds us we can still be deeply moved.

Sometimes in the unrestrained joy of a dog who is simply delighted that you’ve come home.

Not because these moments save us.

But because they remind us that the parts of ourselves we believed we’d outgrown never really leave us.

[this may be one of the greatest songs ever…]