1 February 2026
I am re-coiling the stern line when my hands decide to remember.
It happens like this. The hemp runs through my palms. rough, salt-stiffened, familiar. and for a moment the narrowboat disappears. The canal disappears. The grey Oxfordshire sky lifts away like a sheet pulled from a body and underneath is something I will not describe.
My hands keep working. They are good at that. Twelve years they kept working while the rest of me was somewhere else entirely. Notebook in the left, pen in the right, recording everything the eyes brought in because the brain had signed off early. You learn to file copy from the back of your skull, the part that still remembers grammar when the rest has gone to static.
The rope comes around, loop over loop. I count the coils. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. A good coil sits flat. No twists, no memory in the fibres fighting you. You have to roll each loop between your thumb and forefinger as you lay it. give the rope permission to forget its last shape.
I wish it were that simple.
The canal is still this morning. A moorhen picks its way through the reeds with the nervous precision of someone crossing a room they know is mined. I watch it and think nothing. That is the goal most days. To watch a bird and think nothing. To boil the kettle and think nothing. To stand at the stern with a rope in my hands and be nowhere but here, on this boat, in this unremarkable Tuesday.
Some days it works. The engine ticks as it cools. The water does what water does. I make tea, drink it slowly, wash the mug, dry it, put it back. These small ceremonies. A man I knew. a photographer, good one. he said the trick is to make your life so boring your brain stops scanning for threats. He was joking. I think about it most days.
The rope is coiled. I hang it on the cleat and go below to put the kettle on. The gas clicks three times before it catches. Through the porthole I can see the towpath where a woman is walking a dog and neither of them knows I exist and that is, today, enough.
Rope • Opuss № I