Blue Dress Hot Mess

July

09/07/25:

I let the late afternoon sun dry my tears. Best friends and ex boyfriends are not supposed to lock lips, let alone any other parts of their limbs. Surely that’s a given? Off limits. As the mucus slides over my upper lip and between the seam of my mouth I realise I should go in and wash my face. 

10/07/25:

I am on the train ride towards the rest of my life. Is every train ride like that? Every millisecond of every second of every minute of every day is. That last second — it just hurtled me towards the Rest of My Life. That last sip of water, that last crunch of apple. But this feels somehow more significant, sitting eating banana muffins (just two – I made them and they’re really the size of cupcakes) and an apple in 29 degree heat in the left-hand window seat of a train which left Bicester Village at 18:08 on Thursday 10th July. I wonder in a displeasingly cliched way whether I am in the window seat of the rest of my life or whether I am driving the train. I chew my banana muffin and feel the flour going claggy in my mouth, but I don’t think about that because I am too busy thinking about the Rest of My Life. Really, it is only three weeks away from home. Really really, it is only 8 days. 

The grass is crispy beneath my coral painted toes. I have a blue bruise plumming on my ankle from where a stone fell on it when I was watering the strawberries. (They haven’t grown). It aches, dully, insignificantly. 

Really really really, it is a difficult conversation with a friend, a party, a brunch. Breakfast meetings for careers advice and a second interview for a job I’m not sure I want. The start of an internship. A ‘London Life’. It is my birthday: turning 22. 

There are dead things in the pool. A bee, three wasps. Twenty-one year old me. (We are a lot of dead, living. Skin cells, memories, the past). A cock crows. (France: I want to be in France). I rub my bruise, which is beginning to hurt. The dog stands guard, watching, watching. A live fly lands on my eyelash, so I sink. 

I think I have forgotten my ear phones. Oh well, I want to read anyway. I feel more elusive. I am weighed down by bags which seem as heavy as me. The heat is August-hot, more steamy than July – less succulent. I eat my banana muffins in contentment. Silence. The lady opposite has nice bejeweled sandals and is crackling a Maltesers packet. 

The train has air conditioning and we are in High Wycombe already. I can still feel the restless phantom of a headache which prevented me from sleeping last night. London lies ahead of me on these tracks. I picture it like a crawling beast with tentacles, reaching — stretching my way. Its body is a heavy metropolis. I do not know my way around. I check the screenshot of my Underground route from Marylebone station for the fifth time.  

I miss home already. I miss the puppy, who is now ten whole months old (yesterday). I miss the safety of regularity and am scared of the free-fall of a city, the inability to control anything when so much is taking place around you. 

The train moves through the underbelly of the earth. The tunnel feels like the lit-up insides of a worm. Dry and wrinkled, and ocre-orange. 

Just diamonds and fake tan. I fall asleep listening to the sound of car horns. The windows are closed. It is hot.

11/07/25:

Mum and daughter wear matching t-shirts. Dad wears white linen from his head to his white-trainer encased toes. The woman on the balcony opposite has her dress rolled down over her bottom, her breasts swinging in the morning heat like fat ripe apples in early October. She is unbothered. Naked and Not Afraid. Olive-toned and shriveled like a walnut shell. She takes down the laundry and looks out at the view. Her breasts steady from their lulling swing, and eventually lie still. They slope from her chest in a gentle, aging arch. Her belly swells beneath them. She is beautiful. She is – it suddenly seems to me, in the heat and the traffic and the motorbike roar, from where I sit high on a balcony in Pimlico in a yellow dress which makes me smile and taste bitter coffee on my tongue – extremely beautiful. She is Woman. I feel somehow a part of her, just watching. We are Woman, together.