I like it when words leak sideways. Let me show you what I mean.

I was listening to a band from Mexico City and thought I heard the word 'conflagración', which made me think of fire. The lyric I remembered was 'no hay conflagración' - there is no conflagration. I thought about what this could mean. I thought about the absence of fire. Whatever you do, don't think of fire. Don't think of a sprawling fire. There is no fire. Of course, if you say there is no fire, the mind knows there is. It conjures whatever there's an absence of.

The next time I listened to the song I realised I'd heard or remembered the lyric wrong. The lyric is 'la misma conflagración' - the same conflagration. I don't know where I got the idea of 'no hay' from. Now I was thinking of a fire that was the same as another fire, neither of which I had seen.

And then I listened to the song again, and still I had the lyrics wrong. The noun was not 'conflagración', but 'configuración'. Configuration. The same configuration. Where once there was no fire, now there was the same configuration, and now I was thinking of configurations of fire.

Each time I listened to the song I was walking, outside. I remember little from the walk, other than what I was listening to. I have a vision of clear sun, but was it like that every time?

Before writing this down I had to look up who the artist was, in order to remember their name; otherwise I would remember something of the sound, nothing about who made it. As well as configurations of fire, the sound had me thinking of freshness and play and playful forms. Sitting here now, almost four hundred miles away, I can not recall the specifics of those thoughts.

We drove north last night, eight hours on the road. The sky was low and foggy which meant light sat underneath it like a film of cotton, orange and fuzzed. At one point I said, incorrectly, that what we were seeing in the sky was probably light pollution from New York City, but it was in fact the diffused light of a construction site, condensing on the underbelly of the clouds. The construction site was nearby, over the nudge of a hill. The city was far away. Leafless trees were backlit. I thought of them as 'barbarisms' of trees. Everything seeped and loomed and I thought of another drive in England several years ago, returning south from Manchester. I've written about it somewhere here. It's close.

We had to stop four times for petrol, caffeine, food, to stretch our lower backs. Configurations of movement, discomfort, staying briefly still, then on again. One diner was closed, although they said they were open. They said they were sorry but I don't think they meant it; it's just what they had to say. We found a different place.