It strikes me as odd that after two months, all I am feeling is mild irritation. What should be clouding my view is some kind of red mist; at the very least, I should be slightly aghast at your sense of entitlement.

“God, I’ve missed you.” Your voice almost a whisper, I have to strain to hear above the sound of the cappuccino being made for the pin-striped cliché at the counter, shaking the rain from his umbrella.

What’s going through my head is “Someone will have to clean that up” but what comes out instead is “You knew where I was.”

“I know.”

The silence that aches to be filled with variations on but it’s difficult and it’s hard to get away and you knew my situation when you met me lingers in the air like a penny waiting to drop.

~

I put my hand over the top of my cup as the refill approaches attached to a teenaged girl in a black uniform.

“No, thank you – I’ve had enough.”

I wonder how many times she’s encountered this scene in the short course of her working life, and whether the voyeuristic opportunity makes up for the minimum wage.

“I haven’t,” you say, pushing your cup towards her without looking away, holding my gaze in the palm of your hand.

She pours, and I study your face through the steam, attempting to pick out the lie that doesn’t appear to be there. Look at the eyes – isn’t that what they say? It always reaches the eyes, but all I see is impossibly pale green, piercing in its devastating beauty, the hook that reeled me in now a luminescent sea of I want and I need and I’m sorry, I should have called.

~

“I wasn’t expecting you. Today, I mean. Here. Why are you here?”

Because you are the itch that has always needed to be to be scratched?

“They invited me.” I nod in the direction of ‘them’, as if I need to clarify. “I wanted to catch up. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

‘They’ are at a separate table, discreetly burying their curiosity in paperwork and coffee as you shake your head, slowly, resolutely.

“No. I’m glad you came. I’ve been wanting to see you.”

Then why didn’t you?

Knowing that they already know somehow makes it more shocking when you lean across the table to steal a first public kiss. Soft, delicate, impossibly quick, chaste, even; the stark contrast with what has gone before seeming completely alien.

“Come with me. Tomorrow. I’ve got a couple of days…”

Because I have never been able to say ‘I’m leaving’, or maybe because actions speak louder than words, I reach out to grab the bill and your hand moves swiftly to cover mine, as if tracing feather-light strokes of your thumb across my palm could keep me here. The crease that forms at the corner of your eye lets me know that the hitch in my breath has not gone unnoticed.

“Please?”

~

Outisde, I lean against the wall as the traffic rushes past, the moisture in the air cooling the flush in my cheeks. In for a count of four, out for a count of five. I flip open my phone, scrolling through the numbers for the one I know will ask no questions.

“Can I borrow your sat nav?” I say, after dispensing with sufficient niceties to still be considered polite. “Just for a couple of days?”

“Sure. Where are you going – somewhere good?”

I pull the crumpled piece of paper from my pocket and take in the handwritten address.

“Honestly?” I ask, and I realise the person I am questioning is not the one on the end of the line. “I have absolutely no idea.”

~

Caroline has always thought she has the look about her of someone a few years older than the thirty-six of them that she has so far tucked under her belt, primarily caused by smoking tabs since the age of ten, eating vast amounts of refined sugar on a daily basis and an inexplicable allergy to hair colourant so strong that the owner of her local salon once hurriedly gathered all her staff in a circle and used her as a live, impromptu case-study on the importance of patch tests. Most mornings, you can catch her peering vacantly over the rim of a mug that sports just a splash enough of milk, the teabag left in and the logo “www.fuckoff.com“, trying to decide whether she feels fifty years old or fifteen, and her conclusion will depend upon one of two things: how badly she slept the night before, or how convinced she is that she never reached the end of that stage of arrested development that is so necessary for growing up.

Although she hasn’t the faintest idea why, she nestles herself equidistantly between three London suburbs; were it not for the W12 postcode staring at her from the top of the unopened pile of bills behind the door, she would never be quite sure in which she actually resides. She tells people Hammersmith only because it’s better than Shepherds Bush and because calling it Chiswick would be just one small stretch too far; at any rate, her breeding, if not her accent, would immediately scream ‘fish out of water’ were she to try that one. She knows that the tumbledown Victorian basement flat that she calls home – or ‘home’ – is slightly too rough around the edges to justify the rent; it’s disjointed and nothing matches, but every time she adds another uncoordinated oddity to the fray she smiles to herself because while it makes sense to nobody else, in there, that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.

At the end of a 15 minute bike-ride every morning, during which she will call at least one white-van-man an insufferable cunt from behind the relative, anonymous safety of a pair of five-quid shades and a cycle helmet that she knows makes her look like a tit, but prefers to the prospect of having her head mashed under a bendy bus on the Uxbridge Road, Caroline stumbles half-cocked and generally half-asleep through her days as a content-producing drone for whichever of the corporation’s websites will pay her enough money to do so at any particular point in time. She emails people who sit right next to her and avoids the phone like a dose of the clap, knowing full well that this creates issues on a daily basis with her boss – a man who delights in the finer points of micromanagement but whose occasional propensity to be a nice bloke is the only reason she hasn’t downed tools and walked out this week.

She’s never quite able to put her finger on what it is that keeps her going in day after day, but suspects it may be something to do with the chocolate chip muffins from the fifth floor canteen, which isn’t quite as good as the ground floor one in the building across the courtyard but is infinitely better than the one at the faceless government department that used to keep her head floating above the water line before she came here; casting her mind back, she’s not even sure she can remember which one it was. During the course of any particular day, she entertains herself by wittering pointlessly on LiveJournal, updating her Facebook status in the most passive-agressive way she knows how, laughing at uppity people on an etiquette forum as they earnestly debate the gravity of the social faux-pas committed by a woman not wearing a petticoat in public, and making as little tea for everyone else as she can get away with while still being considered a team-player.

Well, almost. Mostly, the iPod takes care of that one.

~

As she currently harbours the kind of love-life that is probably best buried and unspoken of and seems to be fast approaching that thing that’s not supposed to happen until one’s mid-to-late-forties – oh god, forty – Caroline will almost certainly not be having children – a fact that causes her to alternate between heaving huge sighs of relief and torturing herself with the notion that she has failed at the fundamental point of human being. She regularly shrugs off the nagging thought that the strays she seems to collect are some sort of compensation; there are three who live with her and deposit fluff and leaves and unspecified bits of cat all over her clean ivory bedding, and then there’s Dave, who does not quite live with her and who she only counts as half a cat, because four would just be too many.

Could she be bothered to plug it in, Caroline could set her clock by Dave; if he’s meowing outside the bedroom window, it must be midnight. Dave sneaks cat food from her kitchen when he thinks she’s not looking and willfully craps in the passageway outside the back of her flat as if to make a point, but she doesn’t mind because while he’s doing that, he’s warm and dry and full, and not becoming a tasty snack to a ruthless urban fox.

Tonight, Dave has made a liar out of her by meowing outside the window at 9.23.

Caroline hates liars.

~

Sometimes, she wonders how much can be explained away by the fact that the now 78-year-old Patrick took one look at her in the delivery room and apparently tied a knot in it. She knows she is far too much like him for her own good: intolerant, slightly anxious and a little paranoid, but with the kind of wry sense of humour that gets them both out of trouble and the ability to weave a story from the most innocuous of thoughts. Unlike Caroline, Patrick has an interesting past in motor racing and the ghosts of the 1960s and Monaco and Fangio always ensure he has a tale to tell at the drop of a hat, whereas Caroline’s words just seem to float aimlessly around in her head with no outlet, never really going anywhere or making anything of themselves except as three-line promos on a website that disappear within a week and that nobody really reads. She resembles 75-year-old Elizabeth in looks only; together, they often have trouble holding a simple conversation about anything more complicated than the weather or what’s on the telly that evening for want of a single square inch of common ground, although how much of this is down to Elizabeth’s possibly emerging dementia of an as yet unconfirmed type is still open to debate.

Caroline hates television with a passion equally as strong as the opposing type she reserves for music, but will talk about it until the cows come home if it makes Patrick think that Elizabeth is still conversing. She hopes that in some familial, yin-and-yang kind of way, the longevity of their 52-year marriage will cancel out the fact that she’s never quite got around to it.

~

With every day older that she becomes, her closest friends seem to live a little deeper inside the laptop than they did the one before, waking up with her when, rubbing the grit from her eyes, she lifts the lid just after the sun comes up, and sleeping when she snaps it shut for the night. She’s never quite sure whether this is a good thing or not in a social development kind of way, but wouldn’t be without them for all the tea in china. Oh, there are some in the real world, though; one with whom she lived for 11 years and who she only stopped trying to kill when there were several streets, followed by several towns, between them, and then another, who she adores but refuses point blank to sleep with, and with whom she can talk semi-drunken bollocks until the sun comes up; she sees enough of neither.

This week, Caroline is spending her Friday evening wracking her brains, desperately trying to think of three-to-five big things that are going on in her life right now. The one that until yesterday morning she would have put at the top of the pile has just imploded into oblivion, so she settles for being far too excited about 8pm on Sunday night than someone of her age can reasonably get away with in polite social circles.

At that point, Caroline forgets that she hates television, because she misses him so much already that she almost can not breathe.

Caroline has no idea what she will do tomorrow, and decides, as always, that she will cross that bridge when she comes to it.

When you stop to analyse it, the shock, you realise, is not in the event, but in the way it is revealed; the discovery that what has always seemed rock-solid is not. Like misjudging the depth of the ice atop the lake and plunging unprepared into freezing depths, or witnessing the magic eye picture retreat into the dots as you try to refocus, as if mind over matter could will it back, and yet the longer you look, the more inevitable the disappearance – for much as you try to pretend otherwise, this is how the universe has to work.

Because you it is impossible to predict when the image will fade, you tiptoe around it, trying not to look too hard, knowing that the earthquake that will shake your foundations will be comprised of a million tiny little shocks; twisting, turning, wreaking their individual havoc until the eventual whole is greater than the sum of the parts ever was, and the impeccably neat twin beds that have arrived since the last time you set foot in this place serve as your stark reminder that mathematical probability is never wrong.

At first, you wonder why they never mentioned it, and in return, they tiptoe too.

“She wakes in the night, you see,” he grumbles. “All the time. Sleep apnoea, they say it is. And then that wakes me, and then I can’t sleep for watching her, waiting for her to breathe again…”

“It’s his restless legs,” she says reluctantly, when questioned. “They drive me mad, dear. Wake me in the night, you see. And then that wakes him, and then I can’t sleep for his fussing… “

Tailing off, each blaming the other, or perhaps considering the other, or perhaps beginning the separation, and you wonder if it’s wrong to think of stepping away before the seismic shift swallows you whole.

Who is he, this man who has appeared at the periphery of my consciousness, who arrived in the short, almost undefinable period between wakefulness and sleep?

I am sure that I know him, and yet he looks like no one, and reminds me of nobody in particular.

He comes speaking words I do not understand, that steadfastly refuse to form into sentences; I can neither hear him nor read his lips, and yet somehow I know that I am meant to listen and watch intently.

He talks incessantly, constantly, a non-stop torrent, and yet says nothing of any meaning, reciting empty, silent sentences as his full lips move like those of a fish only slightly out of water; the indecipherable shapes and sounds mean nothing to my mind as it drifts in and around that space between conscious and not.

He takes me to a place I recognise from somewhere in the depths of my memory, yet it is somewhere I can not place in either the past or the present or the possible future. I wrack my slumbering mind to decipher a meaning, to find a link, to pick out some defining feature that will give me an answer, and I soon realise that I cannot and that the point is not to try.

He leads, he cajoles, he encourages, his metaphorical hand placed weightlessly in the space between my shoulder-blades, calming, placating, it’s all right, it’s fine to just explore this small, shallow lake.

The leaves of the overhanging trees that surround this place dip into the water like that first tentative step into a suddenly warmer sea as spring arrives, or lazy fingers that gently swill water around a bowl to make patterns for no discernable reason. A moss-covered, weather-beaten ramp leads me to the water’s edge, and I do not know if I am supposed to follow its invitation or stay right here where I am.

The place I know competes with the one that I do not.

But there, while dark and shrouded in something, looks just as peaceful, and I find that although unwilling, I am not as scared as I should be – or could be.

His frustration is tangible, and then he is gone; pushed away by another, speaking more indecipherables and this time, showing me nothing.

I am faintly aware that by allowing him to leave, to be forced away, I am condemning him to a non-existence. The guilt now a stabbing sensation where the soothing hand once was, I wonder: when he drifts away, where will he go?

Will he fly from my conscience like an angel, or sink like a stone through the water, into which I am too afraid to dip my toe?

This is why I lock myself away here, in this imaginary room, away from risk and hurt and life and taking chances.

This is why my curtains are drawn tight shut, so nobody can peek through the window that leads to my soul and steal it away, for once a part is taken, it can never be returned.

This is why I do not give my heart to people, or allow one to be given to me in return.

This?

This.

This feeling, this uncontrolled intoxication, this rush of something I can neither identify nor understand; raw and unchartered, a jagged cliff face exposed to harsh coastal winds and eroded by the waves that crash over me.

Please, take this heart-shaped box of mine and lock it away again, for you and I both know that it does not belong here; it has seen enough daylight in the space of this one short week to discolour, to singe the edges, enough dazzling rays to pass straight through the angled magnifying glass and scorch its delicate paper covering clean away.

Take the key from my burned fingers and throw it in this fast-flowing torrent; watch it float away on these streaming rivulets and believe me when I tell you that this is why I do not love.

The trick is not to think about what it is you’re about to do. Planning is just another excuse to talk yourself out of it.

Just pull on your anchoring boots and go. Spend enough time lacing them up to feel they are only just secured. Grab your keys, grab your phone, slam the door, and stand in the cool night rain, because it’s fresh, and cleansing, and there.

Get in the car, turn the key, drive, and be glad you didn’t sell it when you thought it looked faintly ridiculous. Remember not to hit the brakes too much; the duff bulb will earn you a pull, and while the fine for the expired road tax would be a small price to pay, you don’t need anything to stop the momentum.

Not now. Not when you’ve only just got going.

Short shift, because it’s fun, and exhilarating, and feels like the power you don’t have. Tune to Kiss and turn it up, not because it’s any good, but because the tempo matches your pulse and reminds you what alive feels like.

Drive, drive, drive.

Put your foot down, flat to the floor, and go. Somewhere, nowhere, anywhere that isn’t here. Revel in how good it feels; if the rain wasn’t lashing, you’d have the roof down and the wind in your hair by now. Turn on the blowers and pretend you have anyway – this is adrenaline that’s meant to be there.

Shift up, shift down, work the timing, work your muscles, feel a part of the machine, feel you have a purpose. Take the racing line around the bend. Go on, you know you want to. You’re perfectly capable – you were taught well enough. It isn’t that tight, the road ahead is clear, and the exit is more important than the entrance anyway.

Remember that when exiting a corner, you don’t put your foot on the gas until you’re sure you never have to take it off again.

~

The only checkered flag is the one in your head. There’s nobody to see you cross it, nobody to cheer and no champagne, but the victory is just as great, and just as you feel as if you could do this all night, you’re back, and wondering why on earth you don’t.