London Bells

I wrote London Bells in 2015 based on the lyrics to the tune London Bells by Aaron Jensen, performed by my a cappella group, Countermeasure.

Another day to remember
Another frame for the reel
Nose to the glass as the country tears past
And there goes a steam train and there goes a barley field

She pressed her forehead to the window. The ground crept along, ten thousand metres below her. Cultivated fields crawled by at a snail's pace, checkerboarding the land as far as she could see. It looked as flat as a sheet of paper from up here. A river snaked off behind the plane, winding, impossibly curvy.

She'd flown occasionally but she never tired of it. She loved the perspective from the sky. Cities looked like dioramas in a museum, impossibly miniaturized, too small to see the bustling activity of countless people going about their daily lives. On the ground, standing on a riverbank, a stream might curve off in the distance; but one could never see the whole picture, never know that it doubled back upon itself a dozen times before encountering the next town.

Another chance to remember
How this age came to pass
We waited so long for the chance to surrender
To weather the dangers of burdens and strangers at last

They hit a patch of turbulence, and the seatbelt light switched on. She watched the wing of the plane as it trembled in the heavy winds. She briefly envisioned the wing snapping off, them spiralling to their doom, and then chided herself for being silly.

She marveled at flying. Sure, she knew vaguely how planes flew: something to do with speed and pressure and the lift beneath the wings. But somehow that explanation never quite managed to reconcile that she was in a multi-ton piece of metal that was flying through the air like a bird.

She considered herself blessed to be living in this time in history. The world was so interconnected. She could make friends on the other side of the world, communicating instantaneously with someone she'd never met and maybe never would. The amassed knowledge of the human race was at her fingertips. There were people living in space right at that very moment.

And yet, they were still so primitive in so many ways. The world still held so much wonder. So many mysteries of nature were as of yet unexplained. Science had barely scratched the surface of the subtleties of human emotion and experience. She marvelled at that, too.

And if the world wasn't round
I swear I could see my own first step backwards out the bassinet
Past summers and solace and stone

She loved the neverending variety of the landscapes below her. Patches of cloud created formations that she fancied were lands just as real as the earth below them. Through breaks in the cloud she could see more fields, interspersed with forests and hills, barely raised against the flat expanse.

When she was little, her family had had a cottage in a forest. She remembered running along the handmade paths, barefoot, savouring the feeling of the dirt between her toes, the sound of the wind in the trees. Her parents had had so many stories about those times, stories of the scrapes she and her siblings had gotten into. They'd become family canon to the point where she wasn't sure if she remembered the events firsthand or if she’d only heard the stories enough times that the memories had created themselves. Those were the happiest times, before the trials of growing up and growing apart had manifested.

Another night to remember
All the souls left behind
Characters cautiously etched in the bark
Remembrances carved as mark in our hearts and our minds

Darkness was reaching across the land. Sunsets looked so different, from up here. The horizon was a brilliant orange but the clouds below a dark indigo, obscuring the ground underneath but for occasional pinpricks of light of towns turning in for the night.

Her parents were dead, now. Her mother from the car accident that had also claimed her sister's life, almost two decades ago, not long after they'd sold the cottage. Her father from a slow, wasting cancer, only a few years ago. She'd only heard from her brother a couple of times since then; he'd moved to the States years ago, pursuing a new life. He'd come to visit when their father died. He had a wife, a child. She'd never met them.

And for the time we're together
In this blink of an eye
Let's agree on the scenery so even if scattered
The seeds that we nourish will flourish like giants in the sky

She tore her eyes away from the window and looked at the man beside her. He was asleep, his head lolling to the side, mouth hanging slightly ajar. She smiled fondly. He'd asked her to move to Vancouver with him. Sometimes she wondered why she'd accepted - they'd only known each other for a few months. But she had nothing holding her in Toronto, really. No family; her friends had all drifted away, wrapped in their own lives and families and stories. So why not? Even if this didn't last, it seemed like time to start a new adventure, a new leaf. Put down new roots somewhere else, somewhere of her own choosing. And his.

Surely as time goes on
I'm here so stand with me, plan with me, reach out your hand to me, see
I'll meet you there
I'm near so heal with me, feel with me, make something real with me
As time goes on

She regretted that it was too dark to really see the mountains as they flew over. But she supposed, living in Vancouver, she'd have plenty of time to see the mountains.

This flight felt cathartic. She allowed herself to let go of old hurts, griefs.

She reached out gently to take his hand, and he squeezed slightly without waking up. He had encouraged her to do things she'd never dreamed of, and in doing so she felt like she'd moved on to a new chapter of her life. One where the shadows of her past weren't haunting her every step of the way. One where she could build a life how she wanted it, rather than cobbling something together from necessity and circumstance.

Maybe I'll settle down
Maybe it's time that I'm moving on
This is something real
As time goes on

As they began their descent, he shifted, his hand pulling away from hers. She considered waking him up, but decided to let him sleep for the last fifteen minutes. Goodness knew he needed it; he'd burned himself out packing, organizing, doing everything he could to help her prepare for the move out west.

He was a firebrand, elusive, flighty. Her friends had warned her against him. He loved her now, but she knew his love could very well be ephemeral, here one day, gone the next. But somehow, even knowing that this might not last, it felt more real than anything she'd ever done. She felt alive. And she felt that if he left, she'd be okay.

She'd broken the cycle of reacting, of fighting, of doing what other people required of her. Now she would only do the things she required of herself.

She pressed her nose to the glass again, to watch the bright lights of the city - her city - for now - grow ever closer.