Ten hours of road, now home.

My girlfriend glues a tiny plastic pegasus to a miniscule swing. The winged horse is cream coloured and the swing hangs from a tree made of brass wire. The brass wire tree sits inside a crescent moon made of sticks, real woodland, studded with stars the same colour as the mythic horse. The stars are glossy and smooth.

If I were to get a tattoo, I think it would be of the sun and moon combined.

At the base of this lunar forest, which is also the base of the tree, precious stones have been embedded: amethyst; onyx; smoky malachite; rose quartz. A crystal grove. One of the precious stones is shaped like a cat, another like a mushroom. There is a metal owl in the branches of wire. The owl reminds me of the mechanical owl in the 1981 motion picture Clash of the Titans, a film in which pegasus also appears.

My girlfriend has chosen to hang this composite in the window of her kitchen. The window glass could be cleaner, but that doesn't matter. It is long past sunset, so we will have to wait to see what the light does to the brass tree and the wooden moon and the precious stones in the morning.

This form is a gift, and all the forms within it are gifts, and the opportunity to see those forms transformed by the sun, tomorrow and tomorrow, is a gift. The sun is sometimes partially obscured, but that doesn't matter. If the sky was always clear our world would burn. I don't know if this is scientifically sound.

Several days ago, we travelled north on a train, leaving what is arguably the most famous city in the world. The city will not always retain this status. There is a significant chance that, within one or two hundred years, many of the most famous parts of this famous city will be underwater. Perhaps when it floods it will become, briefly, even more famous. If you are already the most famous of your species, does increasing your fame matter more, or less? Eventually, everything underwater turns into a forgotten, coral crust, nibbled, in our minds, by angel fish. The most famous underwater city, Atlantis, is an imaginary city. The angel fish is an imaginary fish, until you see one.

The train we were travelling on was decorated, on the outside, with red and green faery lights. The driver shouted the names of all the forthcoming stations in an ecstatic tone, as if he were unveiling a series of prizes to be won, and he repeated the list each time we arrived at a new station, with elevated enthusiasm, for the benefit of new passengers. As the list grew shorter, the list grew louder. But everyone on that train had taken the train before. Everyone knew where they were going, I'm almost certain. Even the people sleeping knew the direction of their sleep. Even I knew where we were headed, approximately, though I'm not familiar with this part of the world, and I kept asking my girlfriend if our stop was the next one, or the next one, or the next one, over the sound of the driver shouting his shrinking list of stations with a joy so violently performed that part of it might have been real. He was shouting so hard I couldn't hear what he was saying. His mouth was pressed to a microphone none of us could see. His voice was a distorted fuzz, warped by the PA system. That's why I kept having to ask my girlfriend where we were.

I want to finish by thinking about light, now and when I finish forever. Now, we have arrived home. That is always the case. I want to remember as much light as possible and as many lights as possible. There are lights and then, of course, there's light.

The train was hung with red and green lights, but you could only see them from the platform, as you embarked and as you disembarked the train, and only if you looked up, or looked behind you as you walked away, like Orpheus. I have spent a number of Christmases far from my family. I don't like to think of these lights as festive lights. When I imagine them as just 'being there', they become brighter. While we travelled, the lights were invisible. The one exception was when another train surged past in the opposite direction, close enough for me to hear it on my tongue, and on the shiny grey casing of this other bolting car the lights of our carriage were reflected, in red and green bands, crossed over each other in neat X's, and I thought of traffic signals telling you to enter, and not to enter. We passed each other and the lights were no longer there.

Further out, crossing the Hudson, the purple lights of a bridge, climbing concrete pillars, dark ice. In that moment, I thought of them as always being. Those lights, whichever I happen to write about, exist. There's light above the rising water, and once it's underwater, we'll have to see what's there.