Chelsea Rathburn

London returns in damp, fragmented flurries when I should be doing something else. A scrap of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries and pub food, long, wet walks without a map, bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu, my halfhearted studies, and brooding thoughts and scanning faces in every bar for you. Those months come down to moments or small plots, like the bum on the Tube, enraged that no one spoke, who raved and spat, the whole car thick with dread, only to ask, won’t someone tell a joke? and this mouse of a woman offered,What’s big and red and sits in the corner? A naughty bus.

Your paperwork in, it’s like the morning after a party, the shaken survey of damage, a waste of bottles where there was laughter. It all seems so much more than you can manage: the accusing cups and stubbed-out cigarettes, the sun assaulting the window, your throbbing head. It’s not enough to face your own regrets (though they’re coming back fast, the things you said) because someone’s trailed bean dip across the table, someone’s ground salsa in the rug with his shoe. So you start to clean, as much as you are able, and think how far those hours have fled from you, before the hangover and your sour tongue, when you felt lovely, and infinite, and young.