Living the city

Wine with friends, with the heat on my back so strong I have to keep my jacket on. It was not made for these conditions and I have never dressed for the weather well. But covered or no, as we talk the sun chews slowly on us. Those across from me grow rosier as we drink, and not only from the alcohol.

I think something broke today, and maybe for the last time. Trust is a slender thread, a delicate filigree that can never be wrought too fine. Once, my favourite bracelet had a tiny tiger-stripe of a flaw: dropped, it shattered into 12 pieces. The same friends who counsel me now bought another, not from Venice this time, but one I treasure more than the first.

And so we drink, and we talk.

And then I wander home. I follow my sheep-track, the urban furrow I trace almost every day which winds from home to the city, and back again.

There are so many people. Girls are in dresses, impossibly short, and they stagger, emu-like in their high high heels. I watch a punk with a foot-long mohawk play on a giant chess-set. I think he makes a good move.

Men keep looking at my chest. I’ve gone up a cup size, my top is tight, and I’m tall. My breasts are at eye-height. I should know this by now. Buy new underwear; buy a new top. Or, at the very least, cross your arms.

I pretend to ice skate down the slope of the escalator. Not for the first time, people think I’m strange. But it’s cooler when I get out, like a fridge door opening on a hot, sticky day. With my bags I walk, past the commission houses, past the cemetery, and the callus on my foot rubs and my left heel is still sore from the shoes I wore the other day. And I walk, past your street and I walk into mine. And I turn the key, jiggle it, hoping that this time it will catch and I won’t be out here for hours, looking like I’m trying to jimmy the door to my own house.

And the wind lips at me like your kisses.

And maybe it's enough.