44 sunsets

I should I have started writing this sooner, while your words were still fresh in my mind. I think we spoke about the sea, I know we spoke a lot about the sea.

Walking along the cliffs edge, redrawn over and over, you tell me how the houses here can disappear. The edge creeps closer and silently they slip into the sea.

There was a campsite you used to walk past and last time you went there it had fallen in. You describe how you looked at that empty space carved out of chalk and wondered how it might feel to lie awake there under a blanket sky.

You had to be careful with your step and so they kept you close.
And you would bury your shoes in the sand and hope for them not to be taken out to sea. Caught in the rip tide, one curves one way, one the other, washed up one day on distance shores, never to sit side by side.

We waded through the estuary in all our clothes and drank vodka and coke on the inlet, carved out of the sand. I didn’t like the taste, it was just so they wouldn’t smell it on my breath.

You imagine the water to be inky black with trails of seaweed glinting green and wet flesh.
In fact it was pale against the dark; opaque, smooth and thick like warm soup, with the soft silky steps of sand and the feel of stiff wet denim against skin. The water reaching up to our chests as we held our arms high for no other reason than that’s what we’d seen them do.

The moon rose red over the sea that night, we thought it was the sun, that something had slipped and reversed the night for day.
And on that same day, the same spot, but sometime later. I watched 44 sunsets in one day he said, and the blood moon did not rise.

He always swam out a bit too far.
That’s how I felt in the city.

Lines Drawn in Dust (2020) is a collaborative film by Lola Bunting, Johnny Bunting and Sarah Lederman, commissioned by ASP6 (Artist Self Publishers' Fair The Sixth) and first shown as part of ASP6 Readings and Performances on Saturday 26 September 2020. Supported by Arts Council England and ICA London.

Watch all the films here.

She wrote to me about the fires and described how the sky was a smoky red haze and the air smelt of burning wood, how the smell reminded her of being in a spa.

‘And the falls of ash came down. Tasting the ash on my tongue’ she said, ‘That was gold and pink, like honey in the morning.’

She wanted to hear more about him. She wanted to know what he smelt like. She said she felt done with the city. 

She talked about the ash clouds and yet I couldn’t see the sky anymore. The cloud here is like a blanket. The darkness is thicker than the smoke.

‘I wasn’t sure if this is what you had in mind.’

 And there’s the image of the mountains draped in cloud with the birds which reveal themselves to be flex of greasy dust upon the glass.
I liked it better before I think, when you described it to me and wish I could see it again that way, thousands of birds flocking across the view finder, interrupting the slow movement of mist and forest and rock.

Extract from That Thin Air (2019)