Five Thousand Three Hundred Fifty Five
You said London so casually, like it was around the corner. Like we could pop down the street to the pub for whiskeys and shrimp toast. Like we weren’t in a strip mall in California. In that moment it seemed unfathomable to me that you and I might have once existed at the same time in a city so far away.
*
London was smoke we hoped would mask the stale scent of gin that washed over our flat. Sitting on a curb outside the dorms smoking a hand-rolled cigarette while we told stories about New Jersey and Philly and Chicago. He and I met on the curb, exchanged numbers on the curb, returned to our respective homes where piles of unwashed dishes overflowed from the sink onto the stove and into the oven.
London was me on top of him in a twin bed, a whimpered plea to stop, to make it last. Curled up after when I realized for the first time how beautiful a back could be. I could picture his swimmer’s muscles cutting through the water, propelling and thrusting where mine would only float and roll.
In October, London twisted me into knots and laid them out for him to untie.
London was me in a hallway, drunk and screaming words I would only ever hear about the next day. A first fight in a romance novel that turned out to just be an old gossip tabloid. We reunited over cold cider and hot breath and the pair of shoes I lost at a bar.
Later, him calling me a bitch, loudly and for everyone to hear, acid on his breath. Bringing a Jane or a Sarah around in front of me when I’d had the decency to wait to writhe against men we both knew in dark clubs and on cold walks home. His words have faded but not the timbre of his voice as he spat my name like an insult he heard once and only just remembered.
I was supposed to be reassured by the record playing over and over in his flat: “hot but crazy,” so utterly American in its condemnation. An indictment of my face as a mask that hid my vices. He sang that song over and over until I started singing along.
London was ready for me. Ready to teach a twenty-year-old all the ways to break herself, how to breathe a pulsing city into her lungs until — too full — they give out, sputtering and coughing.
London watched me kiss a girl by the massive humming speaker, tumble off the bus in New Cross alone and wake up in that twin bed spinning. It saw me in a hallway, drunk and sobbing over bad news and ghosts and the tip of an iceberg. I was laid out on the carpet, suddenly back from the black, when I realized that all my friends were papier-mâché swinging sticks at themselves. How many people crashed before London? How many after? How many funerals were left?
I danced on a table one final time. I wrote letters that I slid under door frames. I flew out in a snowstorm.
*
We couldn’t have existed then like we do now, you and I. My sleepless nights and stomach turning and drunken electricity belonged to someone else, and I was papier-mâché. I would have sucked the air out of your city and pulled it into mine.
But when you stand there in San Francisco smelling of smoke, looking like muscle and fog and gin, I forget where I am. November twists me into knots and I’m falling like only someone haunted by ghosts can. You somehow manage to keep both feet in California so you can’t see me begging to be untied.
London is a story I’ll tell you over a pint, trying to slip it under your skin. I’ll spin it like an accusation: London was a lifetime ago, a different me. And you’ll never realize what I’m really saying about London, or you, or us.
