The moon and sky over Hurlingham Park, 2019

I will never be 18 and sobbing on the phone to my mother because the city is not what I’d imagined. I will not feel so inadequate as that first month, where I could not stomach but salted butter toast and an infinity of hot chocolates. I will not make a best friend over 2×1 pizza deals and Qwirkle dates that winter.

I will never be nineteen and forever late to class because I must pet all the Fulham cats on the way to uni. The owner of the cornerstone on my estate will not ask whether I’m a boy or a girl, and I won’t have to question which answer keeps me safest. 

I will never be twenty and taping up the gaps on the floorboards of the stupidly overpriced mouse-infested flat I share with my best friend. The girl in my performance class will not walk up to us because she forgot the room number, or bend infinity to the will of our first conversation in that unassuming corner of Eel Brook Common. 

I will never be twenty one and a butterfly hungry, deer scouting, tree carving, ever walking, ever talking lover boy. We won’t have spent all of our savings on Sunday brunch at the Putney Pantry by twenty two.

I will not be twenty three and six months late on council tax payments again, or twenty four and heavy armed as I wait inside our local Sainsbury’s for her to water the plants that no one wanted.

It will never be last week. I won’t have to leave her crying at our doorstep as I drive off with all her plants and sweaters packed neatly into boxes and tied together with the knot in my throat, which does not beg to dissolve.

In an instant, I am here and here is not there. Most of the opportunities that were promised were never seized — I am not the insufferably successful artist I thought London would make me. 

So when they ask why I stayed so long, as they do, I’ll say I got busy going into every Waterstones, choosing birthday cards for friends, playing frisbee in Battersea, losing every pub quiz despite having the least offensive team name, walking her home, working two jobs, going to friends’ shows, counting every bus where she fell asleep on my shoulder (417, 333, 270, 14, 74, 159), swimming in the Heath, making her coffee, Italian deli sampling with sweethearts, sitting riverside on every side and walking, walking, walking. At times, sitting at my desk and trying.

London, come to me in that now-then-here dream state we call memory. I will keep you ever true, ever sweet, ever young.

Yours irreparably,

Chet