​Hello Old Friend.

Hello old friend,

I haven’t written in a long time. But here we are.

It’s humid here. The heat building with every step I took on my journey to this coffee shop, each new body on the TTC steaming the air with body heat and ragged breath.

It feels like rain. Like the clouds are going to begin splitting, peeling themselves as water gushes down, ripping them apart to release the weight they carry. I’m on the other side of the world, and have been for almost a year, in a city full of new faces and voices and sights.

But this heat, it made me think of sitting in that garden, the warmth wet in the air, the dry brown grass scratching at my bare legs as I stuck my thumbnail through the stalks of daisies and tied them together. Like a botanical Doctor Frankenstein I stabbed and tied and stabbed until my creation was complete, and each daisy hung, dead and deflated and deformed from my fingers.

We called it beautiful. A lot of ugly things seemed beautiful then.

All of those summers blur into one for me now. A constant stream of memory that flows through my thoughts whenever it can, everything and anything a reminder of that time, of that place, of those people. It’s a pain I can’t quite quantify, an ache that has settled into my chest, and infection that has carved out a space for itself throughout my body. One that I welcomed.

Strangers walk past coated in perfume and cologne and I am jolted back to my thirteen year old self, tall and gangly and alone. It takes me to those rooms, to the gardens and interiors I didn’t mean to memorise.

I can’t erase them from myself. I have tried. They are part of me, I can walk through them when I close my eyes, I could tell you where to find the tea, the coffee, the mugs, the milk. I can feel the wood beneath my bare feet, the banister under my hand as I count the steps upwards to those rooms.

For ten years I sat in that grass, savouring those hot days.

I ran outside when it was raining and embraced each droplet. I watched the clouds pass with no shadows, the sky white and grey and blinding.

The curtains were never pulled, unless it was the final night, and I would sit and watch the weather pass us by in a room that used to feel like home.