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30 July 2017

Long Ago




Last night I returned home after a rare pleasant evening with a friend, watching the day fade into the shadow of the sea. It was late and I was tired, but still I thought I might squeeze in a dozen lines or so of The Seafarer before I could no longer keep my eyes open. I wrote out the lines I meant to translate, and was glad to see that my arm and hand didn't hurt too much. 

I didn't get far, maybe a sentence or so in, before I conceded the battle. My head kept dipping, my eyes closing no matter how I wanted them open. Sleep had the better of me.

This morning when I returned to my desk and glanced over what I had done, I noticed that in the very middle of my vocabulary notes I had scrawled the words 'long ago'. But these words have no source in the lines I was translating, or even on the same page. 

Where had I been? Where had I gone in my sleep that I chose to write down these words?

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