I like you best when I have you all to myself

Curlers, ties, and Motown

It ended face down on stained sheets, as it sometimes does. But before that there was a stage, a bar, a rain of Motown hits. And on the curb across the street, five undergrads tugged on cigarettes.

Everyone kept asking what my major was. The story was this: I was not in school, not employed, did not live there, nor anywhere else, really had no plans. The conversation turned to other points.

And so I found my friends, who asked no questions, just slurred their words and didn’t mind response. Out the cab window, all I could muster up was: Remember when we were those kids?

Trips and tunnels

Months of snakes and ladders led to this perfect rest. Too much television and piping hot tea, autumn’s first cold weather top the window sill. Trips to the grocer to purchase foods she’d never eat.

Walks across the Meadows and quiet reading at coffee shops she frequents; life inside her shoes. Big back cabs are painted with Marc Jacobs flowers, they sit stagnant outside of hotels made of weathered brick.

The sun peaks out only once, really, behind some picture tree. Her flatmates wonder what her friends are doing, flying cross the world to hide underneath a blanket, such sleepish slugs.

To them some shrugs and this: those afternoons are the best we’ll ever have.

Really, really comfortable.

Red wine afternoons in Edinburgh.

You remind me of home

The bus pulls in too early in the morning. It's still dark when we cross the bridge out of the old town. Further wheels turn towards the outskirts of Edinburgh. It drops us off at a new resting place, and so begins many months of inner rest, recovery.

So we download an entire season of some TV show neither of us much likes and begin the alternating napping schedule. Many teas and lazy afternoons ahead.

What we call vacation.

A lovely afternoon at the Camden Markets

My week with Lady Diana.

London, autumn, twenty-eleven.

Friday September 2: 12:00 pm
London

Day one done and on to our mission. Three days, five galleries, spread too many tube stops across London. Saatchi tops the list, so to Sloan Square it is on the most rare of sunny days in England.

We sit and watch the swans in Hyde Park dig their beaks into their feathers. Lose ourselves in the cheap t-shirt labyrinth of Camden Markets. Drink beer outdoors over olives and an envelope of event flyers.

Bring vodka sev to a bench in a parkette up the street from the hostel. Disappear into a plain black bar of east end locals. Stop to marvel at a society of plastic dolls and action figures set up inside the fence of an apartment building on our walk home.

Game over and into bed, Serpentine and White Cube in the morning.

Thursday September 1: 11:00 pm
London

Sleep an hour half on the basement floor, wake to packed bags and a late night party alley. Up İstiklal Avenue to Taksim Square, buy tickets to the airport. Sleep some more by the ticket stalls, the international seats a welcome home mat.

Slump down into any seat on the aircraft. Find the tube and transfer at Notting Hill, Hugh Grant references noted. Out to Sheppard’s Bush and the first English speaking cab ride of the calendar.

Find a pretty lady on a patio behind a tiny hostel. Unpack and to the park, back on the tube to a terribly crowded Soho. South past hummers and luxury haircuts, heels, botox, and lipgloss.

Down into the gaybourhood; tight t-shirt spilling onto streets and bringing with them breath of nineties pop albums. Right into Chinatown and finally a theatre. Four beers, two tickets, the evening showing of Pulp Fiction.