You might find yourself walking the cliff-tops on a windy, cold day, and find yourself mostly alone. All of a sudden you might feel very tired, as if you’d taken some kind of medication that had just kicked in all at once. Your throat will feel tight, as if breath does not come naturally but is something that had to be thought about, an effort made or it wouldn’t happen.

If you look back down the path, there is nobody walking up behind, no one who might help. Don’t be foolish you say to yourself, you don’t need help, you’re just having a moment, but the moment goes on and does not stop, and the air feels thick around you and your skin prickles, all the hair on your neck standing up, as if a storm is just about to break.

You look up, but there are no dark clouds gathering, just a pale blue sky that seems both an eternity away and very close around you all at the same time, and a solitary seagull soaring, wings stretched out as it rides a thermal, banking towards the sea.

Then the bird just stops, in mid-air.

You struggle a breath in, blink, blink again, but nothing changes except a low buzzing and crackling that seems to come from the air itself. The seagull hangs there, frozen in flight, its wings out stiff, the left lower than the right as it had started its bank towards the water.

The water.

You turn your head to look left, and it is as if you must fight a great pressure to do so. The buzzing and crackling get louder, and you feel as if your skin itself is vibrating in time to it. With a great effort you keep turning, and there is the sea, a grey-blue stretching out to the horizon. The waves are in bands, the farthest just a bump in the water, then a distinct wave, then the next flecked with white, and then the fourth caught breaking, the white foam frozen above it, spindrift hanging in the air like tiny points of glitter.

You try to breathe, but there is no breath to be had.

Then everything is in motion, the waves breaking over the beach and surging up the sand until it wasn’t a wave anymore, just a swash of white that retreats into the crash of the next wave, and the seagull keeps banking and arcs over you and over the cliffs and off out until it reaches the sea, straightening out with a lazy flap of its wings until it catches another thermal.

In that time the world was stopped, someone very near you stepped out of it to do something. But you cannot see them, because they are under the ground beneath your feet, in a narrow cave that stretches from the sea a long, long, long way, and ends up somewhere not here.