Spoiler! :
We were greeted by the whistles of smog.
Trains steamed memories into fog; passengers boarded in a rhythmic step of the foot, under the weight of their bags, packed for a day, a week, a year living in the rain of London.
The cement is spotted as a robin’s egg. Puddles coalesce and find love as they are carried to one another in the rain and the footsteps of more passengers, who are almost late.
The windows are fogged, and my pen can barely break the murk.
She is caught with her eyes closed, murmuring his name in her sleep and I wonder if she really loves me when she’s always dreaming of him. Her mouth is freckled with teethmarks, where she breaks her lipstick in nervousness, and her eyes open into brown. I wonder how she could love anyone else when she looks at me.
She goes back to sleep as the train starts, and murmurs London, London.
I am in love with it too.
We leave quietly, even though the train is loud, and dawn opens its wings and it is light as it was back home. Greener, brighter, dimmer. Light. It’s raining again and she’s awake and she says my name, and to me, it sounds like a prayer.
More from my lips than hers, hoping she loves it too.
She draws my face into the fog of the window, where even my pen cannot break, and traces my eyes three times, small holes in the glass where I can see trees and ditches and dirt pass by; a village, another, somewhere close to it now. She laughs as it begins to rain, and she opens the window to let it in; it drops into my book and smears my words, and the picture of me looks like it’s crying as the rain drops through its broken glass eyes, but I’m smiling and laughing.
I wonder how long we’ll last here. Together. It’s still dimmer and brighter and rainier, and I think I might love them both, but I’m not sure. These kinds of things tend to fade, in my experience.
ii
I can’t ever seem to feel the same way as I did before.
I think I understand her more than she does me. She smiles in her sleep and holds my face to hers, and I shift in bed and pull her to my chest; sometimes, I say prayers as she sleeps, because I can’t. I don’t believe in god any more than she does, but god seems to be there, when she’s sleeping and saying my name in her sleep and all I can say is Home, Home, with my eyes open, aching, wondering if I’ll ever know how to sleep as she does. God is there, Home, twisting London into me trying to write; everything comes out starving children and people lost in crowds, their flesh sold in Portobello market as a book or antique clock, all memory and no muscle. There are no coherent words, not to anyone else anyways. My handwriting is cramped as our flat, dark as it gets when we can’t spare the light.
I’m too distracted by rent and food and wondering when she’ll come home. She works now too, making coffee and smiling at handsome men who watch her from their table, wondering what her name is. She doesn’t even realize, but I do, and stopped going to the café. She comes home tired and smiling and I smile too, but my eyes are sad and tired. She doesn’t know, not a bit, and I’d never want her to.
iii
London is bitterly cold. The pages of my notebook freeze together, but she curls her limbs to mine, and eventually, I learn to sleep at night. I wake up with her fingers curled in my hair and she teaches me how to smile a morning at a time, sleeping to wakefulness, but I forget that my eyes are tired.
She smells like coffee when she comes home, coffee and flowers, and I hold her and smell her hair and I remember how to write about gardens and spring. Sometimes, I go sit in the café she works at and she beams at me between words with her customers, and men look at me, jealous because they know she’s mine. I never notice anymore. Now I can write about winter and warmth and a different yesterday.
I walk, during the day, and find my words in the puddles, and I say her name, again and again.
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