The Man Made of Smoke

by Alex North

My mother was a woman who was always impatient to be somewhere else, even when she’d just arrived.

We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.

We are shaped by our pasts, not defined by them.

The idea that our lives are all separate journeys, and that we just intersect occasionally in places a step aside from them, before carrying on again in our different directions.