Burgh Island is a tidal island off the southern coast of England. The same name belongs to Ben Howard’s 2012 EP, which, to my mind, is the most significant piece in his discography. I have never been to the island. On Google Maps, I look at the ruins of an old fisherman’s cottage on the hill. From there, someone captured a sense of vastness in the sea in its austere stillness and the light falling divinely on the water. I want to stand there and look upon that landscape.
“I made a bed where you don’t belong.”
That single line from Esmerelda pounds in my ears as I juxtapose the music video with the image of the sea. It resonates within me. I have made myself a bed in which there is no place for me. My true self, the one who writes, creates and tells stories, has been evicted from it. There is room only for the practical self: the mortgage, work, the daily act of mere existence.
I sit within this divide, suspended somewhere between the music video and the horizon. Let the tide come in. Let it flood the bed that was never mine. I want to be there.