Do you remember the July before we met? In America, our town flooded but in Scotland, the sun rose over the dovecote each morning, and the cows looked up from the grass through my window. I lived in a long, low building curving into Boarhills. A village; a farm surrounded by houses. Beyond the fallow field, the path cut between the woods and the sea. When the tides and 4:00 a.m. sun brought insomnia, I ran, stepped between snails balanced on blades of grass,

and thought of someone like you. In the afternoons I cycled past poppies alongside the road, red as my mountain bike, faces turned to the sun. Evenings, I walked past the overgrown row of beans and looked instead towards the empty church on the hill, backlit by a sunset at 10 p.m. This lonely, wild place

was what I dreamed of last night. Finally, you were there too, with the red poppies and cows and the coming sunrise, but someone had locked my room. All we had: hard brown carpet. You were here, and everything was wrong. But morning was coming through the 4:00 a.m. windows. Outside, the poppies, the dovecote. Beyond the next hill, the call of the sea.