Blue Dress Hot Mess

July

I write this on a little yellow iPad. The train is storming through 30 degree late-July British sunshine in a haze of absolute emptiness. There is no one on it but me. And my little yellow iPad. Just a girl feeling all-too grown up, on her way to a private exhibition at an art gallery in Chelsea. I like this image of myself. I do not know that I believe her, but she’s nice. I’ll try to keep her.

The world is at once very wide and very small. I have new friends, and I like them for who they allow me to be. A woman, with her own ambitions, her past a suitcase on the platform, travelling with her on this hot, hot train, but all neatly packed away in compartments. The luggage rack rattles. Someone else’s suitcase bumps rhythmically against mine. So long as the package of the past stays on the rack, my future is neatly protected; that specific suitcase is yet to be packed.

August

We are in France. I am in a lullaby state of haze, between dreaming and waking, between holiday and the brusqueness of reality. I left my active self on the motorway somewhere between Heathrow and the Channel Tunnel. I have become a holiday version of me, one who refuses to care, refuses to function unless she must, refuses to do anything but drink rose at lunchtime and swat the occasional fly. A coffee, a plait in my hair, the promise of a pain au chocolat for breakfast. The sun is beautiful, soft. Autumn hangs in the air. At the end of July I ate truffle mac n’ cheese outside a pub in London. At the end of August, I will drink champagne on a balcony in the Loire, wearing a lace skirt and a tee shirt which is far too long. I am sunburnt.

September

Perhaps because the summer had no definite beginning, its ending appears more acute. September is born almost before August is cold in her grave. We do not mourn August long; the next month has flown in with the bats, and risen with the morning dew long before the pink sun sets in the purple sky. The Moroccan lamps glowing in the trees are under siege by mosquitoes. The French breeze is warm, the air beneath it very crisp. The breeze is a false promise, and gives nothing but the memory of another summer, that final parting kiss of heat. The cold of the air is a truer friend.

Life is on the cusp again; the swallow on the wing; the suitcase in the rack; the empty train hurtling slowly into the familiar unknown of winter.