Amistad

It's been three years since we stood by the rusty bridge in La Boca and looked out into the gloom together. I remember you wearing an anorak, and that we'd walked a long way, and I remember our friendship wrapping around us as the light eased into the dark. We both had absent loves oxidising in a future we couldn't see back then. Things would happen - sooner, later - to change the contours of our hearts. Our lives were behind us and stretching ahead, but we were present then, you and I, in a city neither of us were born to but where, right then, we belonged.

When you touchdown in Dublin airport, you and I will be three years more than we were back then. Our geographies have shifted - seismic changes, shifting plates - but we'll both be in the same place. Three years will have been and will be gone. We'll walk a long way, along a different river. You may not be wearing an anorak. But our friendship will wrap around us and the light, as it does at the end of the day, will ease into the dark.