soundtracking the spaces in-between

caught between the fantasy of the main character and the reality of imperfection, exploring the myth of the holiday glow-up.

‘Haldern’ by Black Country, New Road is five minutes and four seconds long. I know this because it’s the song I chose to play when landing in London after my flight home from Marseille. It’s a ritual I cling to every time I travel. Each landing is a moment to be curated, a soundtrack chosen with the precision of a poet. For these moments, I seek the contemplative, the emotional, a score to frame the world outside my window and the world within.

The song was initially performed as a piece of improvisation at Haldern Pop Festival in Germany, a piece of music that will never exist exactly in the same way again. I suppose it’s fitting that this choice accompanies my landing, knowing that the version of myself that wandered through French streets is irretrievable now. I will never be that exact stranger again, unknown to everyone. In those five minutes and four seconds, I am both here and there, tethered to a memory as fleeting and unique as the music that cradles it.

I hear the hum of summer beyond the windowpane, but it feels farther away and quieter than ever before. It’s 8:20 PM, though truly 7:20 PM — I’ve yet to adjust to the time zone difference. Aeroplanes might be my favourite spaces. There’s a profound solace in the suspension of time, in the disconnection as you soar above the clouds, the world below rendered insignificant. Sometimes my brain is just on, buzzing and vibrating with thoughts and contemplations I haven’t unpacked and don’t have the time to unpack. But here, I am free to think and feel.

Holidays possess a peculiar magic, compelling introspection and transformation. They strip away the familiar, offering a stage to reconstruct your identity (if only momentarily). They compel you to think about who you are and who you want to be. In these transient escapes, I am unburdened by the gaze of those who know me, free to craft a new narrative and play a different role.  

I've written about my tendency to seek new beginnings and reinvention before:

"I am constantly seeking to erase myself and start anew, to have people see me not as I am, but as I feel I am."

— ‘This summer, I will not wear a jacket.’

This summer, I vowed to confront my relationship with expectation, particularly my tendency to craft unattainable goals and crumble when I fall short. Predictably, like most of my resolutions, this endeavour remains unfulfilled. Holidays, with their promise of renewal, often seduce us with the illusion of a fresh start. They become the climax of our summer ‘glow-up’, urging us to reinvent ourselves through new outfits, manicures, and ephemeral beauty rituals. This impromptu decision to join my parents on their annual holiday left little room for such preparations. Yet, the allure of a new place, untethered by routine and responsibility, beckons with its own kind of freedom.

Despite my resolution to abandon unrealistic expectations, I succumbed to the temptation of romanticising the city. The fantasy of transformation murmured promises of a different self, a cooler version – the ‘main character’, if you will.

Marseille is a vibrant city. Days unspool in step counts and blue skies. The weather is perfect, even in its imperfections. It rained when we wandered into the cathedral; the air was dense with humidity as we scaled the mountain, water bottle forgotten; wind greeted us at the summit. That Saturday afternoon, travel had wrung me out, leaving everything slightly blurred – a brain adrift in a hazy liminality. I overpaid for a scoop of lavender ice cream, garnished with a wafer, sweet and subtle. Perfect.

Everything tastes better here. The peaches, lush and blushing, beg to be immortalised in photographs. The bread is somehow both crisper and fluffier, surpassing anything a British bakery could muster. Someone joked that it’s the Southern French sun that works this magic. How can you bake bread in the gloom of home? People seem more in love here, not just with each other but with everything. They hold your gaze, they smile, they chat. Maybe that’s why everything tastes so good; it’s infused with affection.

At our first meal out, a Frenchman started waxing lyrical about Bruce Springsteen and the virtues of the local fish. The streets are dusty, but not dirty – ancient, yet revered. The noise is a soft hum. As I gaze at the flowering trees, it strikes me that I’ve never truly seen a plant before. It’s costly; the beer comes dear. But it feels justified here, sitting outside in the heat. Everyone’s smoking, but the cigarette smoke tastes just right, and you find yourself content.

Holidays are imbued with this gilded myth, a promise of welcome change. When I was younger, anticipation was a duet between my mother and me—a teacher and student—marking the days until the six-week break. Wales, with its grey and drizzle, made us yearn for sunlight and an escape from the relentless grind of the school week. Yet, plainly speaking: a change of scenery cannot transform a person. The illusion of rebirth through mere relocation is beguiling, but we are tethered to the burdens we bear. Travel is a kind of time travel.

Here I am, in the summer of my adulthood, cowering behind my mother's French as she orders my pasta. The initial relief of shedding self-reliance is intoxicating, to depend on my parents once more, especially after a year of living alone at university. But after mere hours with my mum, I'm hiding behind her like a frightened seven-year-old and it smells like that summer I fell off my bike, skin raw and bleeding.

The strangeness of being mute in a foreign tongue forces clarity, a quiet reverence for words. You speak only when no gesture will suffice, when words are essential. We often squander language, spilling it carelessly, drowning each other in so much nothing. Here, every understood word is a rarity. You cherish the pleases and thank yous like little kisses.

But relinquishing independence brings a resurgence of old habits. This is the essence of time travel; revisiting a place is to regress. In Marseille, I am a stubborn thirteen-year-old again, and my mother is my mother but also a Mitski song. We are living together again and she has opinions again. I thought that nearing twenty would mean I'd grow up a bit, but sometimes I still see my younger self in the mirror—crying over her acne, feeling like her clothes don’t hug her bones right, suffocating in her skin, constantly wound tight, thinking, thinking, thinking.

And then, without warning, the fragile fantasy disintegrates – the expectation that I might become this urbane, cigarette-smoking, wine-sipping muse. Instead, the shadow of my awkward self tightens its grip. The moment her presence resurfaces, the skies turn sullen, the heat presses down like an unrelenting burden, and my mother’s every word becomes a relentless cacophony.  It took but a glance in the mirror — a face not aligning with the daydream, makeup smeared like a sad circus mask — to bring me to tears.

I suppose the holiday never really recovered after that. An unspoken tension lingered. My mother embraced me when cried, even as my anger lashed out, and I wiped my tears before heading to dinner. Dinner was lovely, but I’ve never been adept at letting things go. In my mind, a relentless chorus played: "Well done, Eve. You’ve done it again. Ruined something else. Imperfection, once more, because of you." Resilience has never been my strong suit. I'll seek another blank canvas, attempt to erase the memory.

Because isn’t that what we do? Spin our missteps into stories, papering over the cracks with perfectly filtered snapshots. We parade our curated lives online, masking the messiness beneath. In the end, holidays are just another stage for the performance.

And so I find myself back to aeroplanes. To the spaces in-between. The moments where we can just sit and be. Here, there is no pressure of perception. Perhaps it’s not a complete clean slate. Perhaps I’m thinking about the holiday and how it didn’t fix me. But up here, it doesn’t feel all that important.

I wish I could take this version of myself back with me, but she exists only in this limbo. As soon as she’s back on the ground, with the tether of internet connections and familiar faces, she reverts to that person who demands attention. I am forever clutching at the in-between, pleading for it to last forever. It never does.

I will land. The music will fade. I’ll catch the train back to Bristol, return to the same flat, the same unaltered self. Unfixed.