"Never Back Down"

 Notes from a first visit to Southeast England

I wanted to write down my thoughts about my recent first Southeast England trip but I was struggling to organize all the experiences and fit it into a linear structure of a journalistic article. Perhaps because there wasn't one. Perhaps the reflexive free monologue works better here because it was much more intuitive and emotional. Just a collection of notes and random memories.

I didn’t come there looking for anything in particular. But I found things — odd, beautiful, ordinary things — that stayed with me. A man flinging himself off a pier with the words “Never Back Down” tattooed across his back. A church that doubles as a community kitchen serving homemade vegetable soup with some tables marked as “chatty tables” — an invitation to talk to a stranger if you felt like it.. An elderly woman in a Jack Daniel’s shirt inspecting a porcelain swan in a charity shop. Crumbs of cheap but delicious cookies in my jacket pocket. Benches with stories written on them — quiet memorials to lives once lived right there, staring at the same sky.

I carried my camera everywhere, but I never planned any of the photos or portraits. Sometimes it started because of the way a fisherman stood in the fog that was battling with the sun. Sometimes it was a stranger arriving out of nowhere in a car that looked like it had seen many stories. Other times it was the way a face, mid-conversation, demanded to be remembered. I was drawn not just by how these people looked, but by the sense that these moments belonged to them and they let me in.

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England’s southeast isn't always everywhere so dramatic as its majestic cliffs. It doesn’t always shout. But if you listen, it speaks in fragments: a handwritten sign in a window, a call of seagulls in the fog, a warm glance from someone who thinks you look lost. These photos are part of what I saw. The rest stayed behind — in the sea breeze, in the red bricks, in the cookie crumbs..