I miss the catch if they throw me the ball.

The dress is navy blue and it was dirt cheap at Forever 21 two years ago.

 

I see it hanging in the wardrobe and when I button it onto my body and tie the sash, I look down to see that I don’t fill it out anymore. I take it off and add a padded bra. Marginally better.

 

I wore it on our first date. Your hands were sweaty and as you pawed at me in the taxi, the cheap cotton wrinkled into a state from which I assumed it would never return.

 

One dry clean later, I wore it to the Caribbean where we got sunburned and held hands for six days straight. On the seventh day, you stung my feelings into a state from which they would never return.

 

I wore it again a few weeks later to our housewarming party after I moved in. It was the 5^th of May, and it was my four year anniversary in New York. We made tacos and beat a piñata. My brother tied a scarf around my eyes, spun me to the point of sickness, and handed me a stick. We all beat the piñata to the ground, bashed it in so good, and carried away the toys.

 

I see now that there is a slight chance everything after the Caribbean was against my better judgment.

 

–

 

We all go to Borough Market and see and eat everything. Stinky cheeses, herbed boar sausages, salted caramel ice cream. Cinnamon truffles. A lusciously soft brownie with cranberries. Prosecco. There are giant goose eggs with hay still stuck to their shells. Oysters. Odd-shaped strawberries. Tiny jars of crème caramel with little wooden spoons in them. Tiny tomatoes that taste like tart little flowers. Every kind of bread, vegetable, morsel, we talk about them all.

 

Once we’ve decided on the perfect combination of flavors, we meet in the churchyard to eat and compare. We try and share everything, even the hand-patted butter, which T__ samples using the tab of a Coke can.

 

He comes and meets me for an espresso. This is our second date-but-not-a-date. He speaks to me in Italian and when he sips his macchiato, the foam and cinnamon lick at his nose. He wipes most of it away, but not all, and I decide that this is ok.

 

My new favorite thing is people who eat with abandon. You haven’t felt true love for your friends until you’ve seen them devour a chocolate ice cream cone, leaving a cocoa ring around the mouth, or bite into bruschetta, tomatoes dropping to the floor, oil dribbling down the chin.

 

–

 

I go with Em to a house party in South Hackney. There is a deejay set up on the landing of the stairs and people dance up and down them, a vertical runway. The house used to be a nursery school, so the rooms are painted candy colors and the doors all have little narrow windows in them. The bathtub is full of ice and beer, the aluminium cans of Carling reflecting the watermelon pink of the walls.

 

In the kitchen, Em points at the long tubes of little white plastic cups and says to me, This is bullshit. I want to be at a party with big red and blue Solo cups. This is fucking bullshit!

 

America, the beautiful. We miss you.

 

There’s a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace and someone rolls it up when the Talking Heads come on the speakers. Everyone dances, forty and fifty people in this big house, dancing with their cups and cans. Em tosses about wildly and wonderfully.

 

White wine splashes over the rims of cups as everyone steps about to the music. We douse the carpet in a medicine of merriment and unwieldy arms. The room churns and churns and I could be in any city in any corner of the world right now, but I’m here, dancing. I wonder if I’m having more fun than you. Not just now, but in general.

 

Immediately, I realize that if I’m wondering about this or about you at all, then I’m definitely not having more fun than you.

 

Then a new song comes on and everyone goes bananas, including me, and I think, Yeah, I’m absolutely having more fun than you. Yeah. I always did.

 

–

 

Rows and racks of vintage dresses surround me. I move between the rails, fingering the fabrics, admiring the beading, gasping at the lovely necklines and skirt shapes. Table upon table of pins, baubles, hats, bags. I pull a beautiful wiggle dress from the 1950s from the hanger – it’s teal with a tiny Egyptian print and pearls at the sleeves. When my eyes fill with tears, I feel more like myself again. Finally, I’m enjoying things I thought had changed about me, and that was terrifying. I thought I’d never again see the beauty in an enamel belt buckle or tattered glass-beaded bag again.

 

I go to the tearoom and order a cup of Earl Grey and a scone with cream and jam. I’m spreading it thick and sipping my tea when I get a text from a girl I met the night before, the one with the white sailor cap and red lipstick and a boy’s name.

 

She writes:

Mix ¼ bag self raising flour with a bit of salt and about ¼ block of butter. Chuck in a handful of sultanas and a few spoons of sugar, then stir in some buttermilk til you get dough. Let it stand for a bit. Then pat the dough out onto a floured surface and cut out the scone shapes. Bake them for about 15 mins on a tray at about gas mark 7 – easy! Scones!

 

Love it. Love everything about it.

 

–

 

He comes over and when I open the door, he’s shiny from the heat and smiling broadly. He holds bags of groceries, which quickly turn into a meal of spaghetti with prawns and toasted garlic bread. He talks to himself in Italian and in French as he cooks, tossing ingredients about, willy-nilly and unmeasured. When he opens the spaghetti, he doesn’t rip the plastic apart like a mortal – he slams the package vertically on the countertop and it pops open, noodles bursting forth like a hundred stiff fingers.

 

We turn the scaffolding outside my window into a balcony, taking our wine out there and standing among the tools left behind by workmen. It’s warm and still light out and we kiss a lot more than we should.

 

He is so Italian, and thus, I trust nothing that he says. His words are refined, poetic, and they are also rehearsed and precise. He knows what he’s saying. And everything he says is attached to a curvy mouth, heavy-lidded eyes, and shiny black curls. There is nothing trustworthy about this man.

 

When he compares me to Goya’s “La Maja Desnuda”, I laugh and laugh and pretend I’m somewhere else, with someone less silver-tongued. What should be effortless and easy becomes tiring.

 

I want to sleep, but I can’t.

 

The next morning, there is a note. Bits of it are in Italian and French. I start to translate it, and then I lose interest. I pretend instead that it says:

You are lovely; let us never see each other again.

 

And I’m okay with that.