“Tu as beau temps, ta route est pavée d’étoiles.”

“The weather is good, your path is paved with stars.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Light jacket, golden bracelets, ankle boots, laptop and even the mostly plastic wristwatch. Everything gets deposited into the grey bins and pushed onto the rollers in under 30 seconds. Probably even less than that. I have no idea. Then I wait my turn to be summoned in mismatched socks through the electronic threshold.

“Well done,” says the security agent as I make eye contact after proceeding through the electronic scanner with no offending report. I move on to await the outcome of my belongings passing through the scanner. I take other peoples’ empty bins and deposit them into the bowling alley-style bin collection machine.

I’m really good at traveling. Especially when voyaging solo because I can then vest all of my brainpower into executing the mind-numbing rites that entail me keeping a grip on the myriad misplaceable essential items while simultaneously thinking to what’s required next in order to turn up on the other side of some far-flung security check. 

Early yesterday morning I was walking to work as I normally do. At this time of the year, it is unavoidably a pre-dawn experience for most people rolling into the office; this is the price that comes with working in northern Europe. Shortly after 6AM, the temperature was above freezing but in traversing the incline that leads to my building, the metal gratings and drainage covers were deceptively icy. I made a mental note to use care as I pressed forward, passing the few familiar silhouettes who always pass me in a reverse route as they head to the tube stop. We never talk. We never gesture. It’s dark and we’re focused on our immediate destinations.

I’ve done this walk hundreds of times, and I have done it through every season for several years now. But this portion of the year always feels the hardest, no matter how comfortable or prepared I am to undertake the ritual. See it always strikes in late January where I accept that we are all now in the thick of things. It is dark, it is winter, and this act of going through the motions simply must be done no matter how dark it feels or how tired I grow of the process. SAD, like adulthood, is a real and often tedious thing.

 But there is something about mid-February that invariably becomes one of the most notable periods of the entire year for me. It happens when I am enduring a sort of layover between expectation and low-grade desperation. It happens when I am walking to work and coming to the top of that slippery morning incline. I usually feel beaten down by the excessive earthly darkness and in reaching the crest I instinctively glance skyward for encouragement. From November to early February, it only feels dark dark dark. But, au fur et à mesure, something different is happening. Much like those long-haul night flights that pay out the gift of a slow crescendo sunrise, there does come a day where I can detect the changing light.

There is clearing that comes into view as you hit the top of the incline. Here, if it’s a crisp and clear morning, you get a sharp spackling of star and air life as they float over London. Because it is so dark in winter, the stars feel truly three dimensional, and texture of the sky always reminds me of a Rebecca Denton etching and the testimonies that Saint-Exupéry captured during his night flights. 

Yesterday, before I packed my bag, slid on my bracelets and departed for the London airport, I conducted my usual walk into the office. The coming weekend and When will this winter ever endwere the two things that were chiefly on my mind. I thought vaguely about both as I willed my way to the top of the hill. And then I gave a reflexive glance up to the morning sky. 

It was a tiny thing, but suddenly I realized that I was no longer presented with an evenly painted midnight blue. Instead, panning from the view overhead slowly down to the trees, there was a sort of electric blue gradation. And across the expanse of the carefully scaling tone, I pick out a handful of stars that seemed pointed and arranged around a triangle of three contrails intersecting. Two of them were being carved in real time; two aircraft had just moments ago hurried past each other like early morning commuters with somewhere pressing to go. The third vapor trail had grown frayed in the time it had taken me to climb the hill, and its state of dissipation reminded me how stasis really is difficult to maintain. The sky does eventually brighten, even if it sometimes doesn’t feel that way. All of our routines are not given to futility. 

I’m airborne now and it is a late winter night. Like my recent morning journeys, the air over Europe is incredibly clear. After so much air travel, I sometimes become engrossed in the scraps of diversion that I bring aboard. This trip is no different. But a passing glance out my port side window revealed a cluster of light that could only scream capital city somewhere over the continent. My bones realized before my brain that this electric light was Paris.

For the people below, I am now one of those skinny planes moving quickly and painting contrails across the sky. I knew that I had to act quickly. I dug out my phone and did my best to snap some photos as we passed overhead. I smiled as the Eiffel Tower was so clearly in my viewfinder. She stood out like the stars that hung in the sky on my walk yesterday morning. It was another reminder, somehow, that life is full of surprise and changes. Usually it is just a matter of trusting the system and continuing to push through the mental inertia in order to reach them. I thought a bit more about the darkness. “Well done”, I thought to winter. It’s not as harsh as it seems, and at this time of the year, I shouldn’t be so harsh in my perception of it all.