Sweet Dark Glittering World

London calls. London roars. London drives on the left hand side. London blinks like the Christmas lights. London swings like the earrings that hang from the ears of the girls and the boys. London—phosphorescent—like the moss between the bricks. London shuffling and stomping like commuters on The Tube. London winding and bending like the river, like the road. London trudging through the rain and the mud.

December, here, is heavy with a Vitamin D deficiency. The sky turns grey and weeps. The sun drops its eyelids at 4.30pm. The night cuts everything loose. Glasses breaking on the street. Everyone talking and laughing like they’re trying to make the ceiling jump. I imagine all the light bulbs blowing from the cacophony. And I imagine the stars that are out–up there somewhere, over the cloud cover and the light pollution. We walk through the dead of winter home. The streetlights craning their necks and kissing the top of our heads goodnight.

 We’re almost halfway through this journey now. Whitney moved out of her apartment—packed up everything and put it in cardboard boxes—in the name of it. How far we’ve both come, and even further to go. Hurtling across the Atlantic and crash-landing in another city. This small world—my sweet dark glittering world—grows bigger and bigger. It wraps me up, pulls me over, swerves off the road and scares the living daylight out, sends me out to sea and dares me to swim back to it.

I must look life dead in the eye. I try to get good at it. Holding on, and letting go. On my last day in the States, I abandon my Superstars–wrap them in my old teenage clothes–and hand them to the man at Goodwill. I push the door open to leave, and make it up 2 blocks before the gravity pulls at me. Howling and hot blue. I want to run home. But where is home anymore? Headphones in, head spinning—one tear rolling—on 5th Avenue. Oh America, we must part sweetly. You maxed me out, made a dizzy hero out of me, sent me flying across the Pacific Ocean. Come over and sit beside me. Let me look at you one last time. 

The woman in New York told me my aura was red. “Red in the past, red in the future”, she said. I remember her fingernail tracing the photograph she took, up to the magenta above my head, “romantic thoughts”, before landing on the orange around my heart, “there’s a brightness you’re trying to push”. I was a girl stuck in traffic in the backseat of a taxi in Manhattan, and now I am a girl up above the streets, sitting in the second story of a double decker.

I must look life dead in the eye. I am a nobody. I am a somebody. I could be anybody.

Originally published on World’s Greatest Internship here.