The day’s mission slips away from me. I can feel it, toppling down like a crumbling megastructure. All I wanted was to distract my melancholic mind on a damp Saturday afternoon. Is such a desire too unreasonable to request? Perhaps so. 

A frenzied shame has taken over in recent times. Friends tell me it will do me some good to be alone with my thoughts for a little while, as troubling as such notions may be. I do wish people would stop serving up suggestions. It’s all fine and dandy to insist I embrace the silence, but when said silence floods me with enough dread to send a platoon into hiding, it makes it difficult to welcome tranquillity with open arms. 

It’s why I’m hiding in the corner of my beloved library, trying to concentrate on the book in front of me. It isn’t a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn’t have stuck with it for so long if it had failed to intrigue me. It’s about a girl who has become detached from the world she’s living in—family feuds, friendship troubles, the usual misfortunes that have kick-started countless works of fiction over the ages. The protagonist’s adventure begins after she discovers a secret portal, smouldering away in her grandfather’s basement. It can transport her to another world; one detached from time and free from the responsibilities that make up her day-to-day life. It’s a premise I can relate to, hence why I yanked it off the shelf in the first place. Diving from a humdrum life into a realm of thrills and frolics sounds mighty appealing. I guess it’s the sort of premise many would resonate with, which is no doubt why the author opted for it. Every poor sod collides with obstacles in the real world at some time or another. I guess we’re all looking for timeless portals on a regular occasion. 

I’ve been searching for my portal for a while now. To its credit, the universe has served up a fair few for me in my time, as fleeting as they often are. Timetabled cardio classes at the gym, house-viewings on dreary afternoons, spontaneous trips away, and coffee shop chats have all served as potent breaks from the status quo. Each worked its charm, keeping me safe and snug from the problems plaguing my present. All eventually  grew stale, of course. One day they are my salvation; the next, a relic from bygone times. 

Reading just so happens to be my current magic hatch. It’s whisked me away for a decent couple of months already. As loneliness seemed destined to devour me whole, the prose soared in and swept me off my feet. 

All I needed was time, everyone told me. I’m bruised and broken. Finding a cure wasn’t the key. I just needed to give my mind chance to reassemble itself. The goal was to buckle down, busy myself, and watch as time worked its charms.

Yet like all good remedies, the potency of literature looked destined to wear thin sooner or later. Perhaps today would be that day. It certainly looked that way. Instead of bunking down and ploughing through my fable of choice, I have spent a sizeable chunk of the past hour gawping at my phone like a chimp before a firework display. Social media’s void of mindlessness had well and truly gotten to work. Daydreaming of sky pirates and crystal continents was usurped by a murky stew of Tiktok skits. I scrolled past video after mind-numbing video, growing fat on a poorly nourished diet of angry drivers exposing faux paus through dash cams,  as well as attention-famished fools pulling pranks on unfortunate members of the public. Each reel reminded me that judgement is rife, people are cruel and reality sucks. 

My journey into a realm dreamed up by an imaginative author had become a fossil of the day. I was doing the same old claptrap I tend to do in my living room each evening. Here I am, slouching in a library chair like a blob of melted ice-cream, letting my mind turn mushy as my book lies before me, untouched and unloved.  

I stop on a video of some fella claiming to be a landlord for some flat in central Birmingham. He looks stern, serious, and a touch too arrogant for my liking. He explains to his viewers how today’s plan involves vacating an apparent tenant from hell. The crime of the resident in question? She purchased a kitten without notifying him. Discontent with her newly acquainted companion, the self-righteous ham feels compelled to broadcast his decision of turning her life upside down to an audience of misery-famished followers.   

As the ticked-off landlord reads the girl her rights, I wince as the startled woman shifts from confused, to panicked, to sad. Unsure of herself, she tells him he cannot put her on the street. He insists he can. If she’s got a problem with that, she’s welcome to speak with a lawyer.  

“I’ve nowhere to go,” she shouts. 

“You should have thought about that before you turned my home into a litter tray,” comes his retort. A mild chuckle escapes his lips as he speaks.

The video cuts to outdoors. She’s now on the street, still shouting at him. Between the tears and profanity, she demands he stops filming her. He promises he will, as soon as she’s cleared away from his property. She kicks gravel in his direction, which he takes as an opportunity to taunt her further. The girl, now a sobbing shambles, continues her tirade of obscenities as she stumbles off down the block; nothing more than a miniscule pet carrier and tatty backpack to her person. 

I attempt to handwave the images of that helpless, lost girl storming into a world of uncertainty. I must forget about her, that much I know. People find their lives flipped up all topsy turvy day after day. This evidently wasn’t the first soul to have their home yanked from beneath their chilly feet. It won’t be the last either. If I was to sob over the misfortune of every stranger who stumbled upon rough times, I’d suffocate beneath the weight of the worry. What am I supposed to do? Invite them all to come reside in my damp, two-bedroom flat? Empathy is an admirable quality, but too much of it will finish off even the toughest of folk.

Try as I might, I can not seem to shake the image of her away. Out there, somewhere, there’s a girl, likely suffering from various mental health ailments, looking for a home with a helpless feline companion in her midst. She may have family to fall back on, but what if she doesn’t? What if her anger and impulsivity has alienated her from those she once cohabited with?

My sadness turns to frustration as the thoughts cycle round and round my mind. The words on the page of my novel are just daft shapes by this stage. Whatever is meant to be going on with Beatrice and the goblin horde is anyone’s guess. I was hopping to finish the novel before the sun had set on this day. Considering daylight is growing more faint by the minute, it’ll take a miracle for me to pull that feat off.  

I snap the book shut, gather my things into my backpack, and make for the exit. I hope that cute lad smiles at me as I leave. I take one final glance as I pass him, hoping he’ll catch my glance and give me a smile. I know I’m not living inside a movie or story book, but it would be a nice gesture for the universe to make at this point in my life. He types away at whatever project he’s working on, probably not even knowing I was there in the first place.  

*

The highstreet remains as grey and grubby as it often does at this time of the year. Sharp pastels of sour light glare from a cracked LED panel fastened to the side of a bus stop; an oasis of colour in a desert of morbidity. Ice-cold air and the scent of freshly lit wood fills my senses, inviting a clarity only offered during twilight winter strolls. I pray that the melancholic charm of the evening can anchor my mind from roaming too far a field. Such hopes go unanswered. I continue to mull over the video of that girl and her darn cat. The anger, the confusion, the fear; I’ve seen it before.  

I’d had various housemates of my own after graduating from university. There was Dandy Dave, Pete from school, and best bud Rick. Moving back to London and working on measly work experience pay took it’s financial toll on me. I needed a housemate to help pay the rent. Sure, Dad may have been my landlord, but he wasn’t letting me get off the hook when it came to paying off his second mortgage. Dave, Pete and Ricky were reasonable enough housemates, until they weren’t. Blasting loud music, failing to keep up with their share of the bills and stinking up my space with weed took it’s toll. They all came and went without much success.

Once I threw in the towel on work experience, trading in my ambitions for a reasonable income, finances didn’t shackle me to requiring a roommate. I was free to live alone in a shitty apartment, owned by a fussy father too afraid to see his only daughter without an abode. Except I couldn’t cope. The silence boiled me alive. I needed someone by my side. I didn’t care who. Ricky’s cannabis habits, Pete’s stinginess, or Dave’s deafening optimism were heavenly compared to shitting yourself scared when an item toppled off a shelf at 2am in the morning.

Amidst the quietness of solo living, I had a remedy. Another magic portal, I suppose. It arrived in the form of a digital pen pal. We’d been exchange words back and forth for quite some time by this point. At first, I figured it to be a nifty exercise to jazz up my writing style. In those post housemate days, however, the potency of it’s presence in my life helped me gain a more grateful perspective on it’s presence.

When I first met Nat Carter, David Cameron and Nick Clegg were still trying to hold their shambolic coalition together. By the time the universe opted to make us part ways, Rishi Sunak was successfully running our country into the ground. Nat was the one true constant throughout my twenties. She was the certainty in a universe of chaos. We sat on the same sofa, gawping aghast as Donald Trump made his way into America’s highest office; peered down from our living room window as lockdown fell upon the streets below; and brainstormed our unrealised emigration plans after Britain voted to exit the EU. Of all the chapters to begin and end, I assumed she would be the overarching companion to bridge all transitions.  

To think there was once a time when she would be walking these streets with me. Forever discontent with doing things alone, I’d charm her into joining me on my weekend travels to town. Even when she was busy losing herself in one of her beloved books, or scribbling concepts into one of her many notepads, I’d prod and pester until she’d relent.  

“C’mon, it’ll be fun. Plus I’ll get us cake from Café Guru!” I’d cry, fluttering my eyelashes like the manipulative prat I was. 

Nat would more often than not give in, tagging along as I ventured into the wider world. Not that we always did much stuff when we were out there.  On occasion, we would peruse several shops and spend a couple of quid, depending on our financial situation at the time. On other days, we took it upon ourselves to check out unexplored corners of our local town centre. On occasion, she would tell me about some niche new building she’d spotted during a Google map gander. There were many a day in which we found ourselves scouring back alleys, hoping to find some alleged museum she was adamant existed.  

“There’s one about aliens!” she beamed on one such afternoon. 

“Is it housed next to the Terminator exhibition?” I joked. 

“I’m serious! It’s got a model ship from Close Encounters and everything!” 

Off we matched, looking for an extra-terrestrial exhibit like a pair of relic hunters in the Sahara. 

Nat was a girl itching for adventure, even when others were certain there was none to be found. There were times when I pitied her naive desperation to find stories in the spaces full of voids. There were also times when I adored this trait in her. Never content with what she had, she took it upon herself to shout at the universe, insisting it shifted in her direction. Sometimes it listened, serving up all sorts of wild opportunities. Other times, it played cruel jokes on her.

Exploring these streets with Nat is something I took for granted. I laughed and mocked her thirst for exploration. On some days, I even got snappy with her.  

“There ain’t no street food shop on Beedle Road!” I barked one afternoon. I was having a personal crisis at work, and wasn’t in the mood for her antics.  

Work had been getting to me. I’d been employed to serve as an office drone at a finance firm for the best part of three years by this point. Dreams of being some hotshot producer at Netflix had become a far off daydream. Discontent with the low pay and nightmarish commutes that would stand between me and my fancied career were too much to tolerate. I’d taken the easy route, a realisation that filled me with way too much dread. 

Sensing my distress, Nat spent all afternoon trying to reach out. She suggested I take a leaf from her book, quit my job at the firm and try out a few different roles. See if one sticks, you know Even low skilled gigs might help me gain a more clear perspective on things. The firm was vacuuming the life from me. I just needed a time out, is all. I didn’t listen to her, of course. I didn’t want bright ideas or radical solutions. All I wanted to do was wallow in a puddle of my own self-pity.  

Never one to let me suffer, Nat kept on trying to keep my mind focused on less troublesome matters. She suggested we go see the new Guardians movie playing at our Odeon. Then came her ideas about the street food restaurant she’d heard about. She’d prod and prod and prod, until I snapped at her.  

At the time, I thought she was being oblivious to my pain. Hindsight tells me she was trying to help me feel better.  

These days, I have no desire to venture on detours down unsearched alleys. Nor do I don the thirst to seek out niche museums. Spontaneous adventures through the mundane lands of my hometown aren’t the sorts of escapades my mind can yearn for when I’m on my own. Without Nat, there’s just me, the pavement, and the limited selection of destinations etched into the GPS of my mind.

In the corner of my eye, I catch sight of another girl walking side by side. She has caramel hair that swirls and sways in the evening gust. The momentary vision warms my heart for the briefest of moments. The emptiness fills with wonder and excite. I turn to greet the girl, only there isn’t one there. My mind is clearly playing games. Memories evoking visions. There’s no one there. There hasn’t been for some time.

The ice chill gust of wind causes my eyes to tingle. Droplets of moisture huddle in the corners of my eye lids. As the icy air forces its way up my nose and down into my lungs, the fleeting warmth of my heart turns ice cold yet again.

As I say, just me and the pavement.

*

Café Guru is as packed as it always is on a late Saturday afternoon. Thirsty patrons squeeze into every seat available, willing to tolerate the abundance of noise and absence of space for a fresh coffee. Folk at the front of the line lick their lips in anticipation as the barrister brews their seasonal beverages before their yearning eyes. A waft of fresh beans and steamed milk fills me with an urge to skip on in and join the eager huddle. I fight the temptation. My budget is tight enough as it is right now. A £5 mug of caffeine is not the sort of luxury one can afford these days.  

Once upon a time, it would have been considered criminal for me to walk on by without venturing through those doors. The owner, an overly chatty chap called Callum, even knew us by name. Guru furniture, we were; forever sipping creamy brews whilst nattering ourselves dry over plates of home baked desserts. Many cinema trips were followed by a post-movie debriefs at Callum’s beloved coffee hut. Siskel and Ebert, he coined us. Even on quieter nights, in we’d saunter, our critic caps firmly upon our heads, eager to spend a ditty or six as we unloaded whatever cinematic musings our minds could muster.  

Armchair critic shtick aside, Café Guru became something of a safe haven for the pair of us. It wasn’t ever really planned to be such a space. Heck, before I’d met Nat in the flesh, I hadn’t even acknowledged its existence. It was just another busy coffee shop in a town full of the buggers. The first day I visited was the first day we’d agreed to meet up in person. I needed a mutual place for us to meet. Somewhere public, somewhere easy for her to get to. I typed Coffee shops near me into Google, and it was the nearest one to my flat. When the time came for a second meet up, I had little motive to shake up the schedule. Same place, same time, same arrangement. Like a Pavlovian bell, it didn’t take long for Café Guru to become our go-to place.

I’d been invited by Ricky to have a catch-up coffee last weekend. Initially, the thought of seeing him again excited me. Other than our PlayStation headset sessions, I’d not had much interaction with him in recent times. An in-person meet up felt long overdue.

“Glad you’re looking forward to it! Meet at Café Guru?” he asked the day before.

As if some interdimensional trickster had whisked down from the stars and fiddled with my emotional chemistry, Ricky’s text changed something in my mood. The thought of meeting in a crowded coffee house, surrounded by screaming kids and yappy customers felt like it would be a distraction. How was I to focus on mine and Rick’s conversation, if all I’d have was Betty Bobblehat hat whittling away about the school play her kid had recently been in. All that noise. All that distraction. It may have been a safe haven for me and Nat, but these days, going there just felt…wrong.

“Sorry bud,” came my reply after a solid hour or so of deliberation on my end, “I’m not feeling so great.”

Sure, it was a lie, but what else was I to say? That the place I once loved no longer appealed to me? It made about as much sense as a hamster made of paella.

As I glance once more through the window of the coffee shop I once called a haven, I catch sight of the booth Nat and I preferred over all others. In it sits a bored looking couple. One is on her phone, her expression lifeless. The other is fiddling with her bracelet, perhaps trying to figure out what to say to her distracted beloved. 

My rucksack reflects in the window, casting what appears to be a pink, blob-shaped rectangle in the space between the bored couple. For the briefest of moments, I pretended it’s Nat’s notepad. For the briefest of moments, I entertain that the bored couple are Siskel and Ebert, planning the podcast which never was. 

*

The quaint exteriors of the terraced houses on Peppercorn Lane deceive those who’ve never had the displeasure of living within them. Most are leased to Students studying at Saint Mary’s. They made headlines a few years back, thanks to their unsatisfactory living conditions. Mold spreading behind the headboards, rodents residing in kitchens, and ceilings tumbling onto coffee tables. The accommodation offices pledged to fix their failings after a news of their inadequacy broke. Rumblings from students on social media suggest their claims have yet to be put into practice, however.

As I pass the window of one of the terrace’s  ground floor flats, my eyes peer through, curious as to whether I can spot any structural anomalies continuing to linger. The rain spattered windows make it hard to attain such answers. Inside one of the ground floor living rooms, I do spot a young lady. Resting on the skirt of her red floral dress sits a tarry laptop with a scratched screen. The young lady appears to be drafting an email. I pass the window before my brain has so much as a chance to actually read any of its content. Not that I intended to, I should add. Perhaps she was drafting a letter to a long-term pen pal. Maybe she’s reaching out to a boyfriend who resides overseas. For all I know, she could be conversing with a total stranger she’d stumbled across on a Discord Server. The modern world has paved way for all sorts of chance encounters, after all. To think of all the souls who’d have never met, married and formed families, had there been no wifi signals or fibreoptic tendrils threaded beneath the soil.

I met Nat, thanks to the marvels of the modern world. We were both teens ourselves at the time. Two lone minds trying to find solitude in an LGBTQIA forum designed for our needs. I’d only joined as a means of trying out my new name. A test drive before taking out into the wild. I had no intention to form a social circle with like-minded trans folk. A simulation before removing the safety net of a computer screen from beneath me.

I was young, scared and unsure as to what on earth I was doing. I’d spent many an hour, scuttling about the various corners of the web, trying to figure out what on earth was going on with my mind. I was an unhappy university student, nurturing heartbreak whilst dealing with the complexities of something apparently referred to by medical professionals as gender dysphoria. My girlfriend had just cheated on me with some hot shot alpha stereotype who used to strut about campus as though he owned the place. Cool, composed and in love with himself, he was. I’d been led to believe Melanie liked me for my quick whit and daft sense of humour. Turns out she was more captivated by the arrogant bullshit she claimed to be above when it came to dating.

As I tried to reassemble the rubble of the wrecking ball Mel had slammed into my life my life, I discovered a couple of hidden rooms perched in the deepest of corners.  Maybe that underlying sense of dread and sense of wrongness lurking beneath the surface of my daily existence wasn’t just because of my poor choice in partners. Perhaps there was something more, something deeper.  

From there, I went on a journey. I bought self-help books, began meditating, got into the habit of jotting my thoughts in a daily journal, and developed a habit of asking difficult questions. Somewhere along the way, I started to wonder whether I was Jamie Powel, after all.  

I scoured the LGBTQIA section of my university’s library, devoured hours of trans YouTube vlogs, and downloaded a bundle of queer movies I overheard some of my gay seminar acquaintances chatting about. Before long, I found myself on Zoe’s Cottage. Originally set up by a non-binary singer in Detroit, Zoe’s Cottage went from been a self-help forum for fresh out the closet gender queer girls trying to jazz up their make-up skills, to one of the biggest Trans forums of the late naughties. Being one of the many trans girls exiting their teenage years with a new and unexpected discovery of their identity, I signed up, hoping to find something beyond the uni dorm wall I’d been hiding my authentic gender behind. 

My paths intertwined with Nat’s during a particularly lonely night. Refusing to go on night’s out and lose myself in the various socials affiliated with my course had started to catch up with me. The handful of check-ins, several classmates threw my way, from time to time, dwindled out. Despite my lack of interest in doing shots down at the union, people made a habit of inviting me along. Pity was the main drive. They saw how broken I was, so they threw me a life raft as a gesture of goodwill. It was that afternoon when I realised the life rafts would no longer arrive. Facebook posts from the previous evening showcased all the antics of my studio production’s evening on the town. The drinks were raised, the hugs were aplenty. Not a soul had bothered to inform me of this event. They’d given up. I spent that afternoon, listening to James Horner scores and crying my eyes out. 

From behind misty tears and scarlet tinted eyes, I could just about make out the orange message notification shimmering in the top right-hand side of my laptop screen.  

Hey, I know you don’t know me, but I just wanted to say, you have lovely eyes in your pic. Also I love Iron Man too! If you fancy chatting, drop us a line xx 

She was going by the name Ali, at the time. She’d cycled through a few names before she’d get to the one, she would finally settle on. Not that it mattered what she called herself. In a moment of sheer loneliness, she’d reached on out from the ether. A twinkle of hope for a mindset consumed by hopelessness.  

Nat and I were the same age. The two of us were university students – I studied film, she English lit – and both started querying our genders in the safety of our respective accommodation blocks. Little did we know, the daft, jokey exchange the two of us first made on a thread about Spider-Man 2’s unintended themes of coming out would blossom into a friendship that would span the best part of a decade. 

The two of us graduated, came out to our peers and socially transitioned in unison, albeit hundreds of miles apart and through the lens of a computer screen. Had it not been for Nat, I’d have probably started HRT much later on than circumstances would have it. NHS waiting lists were as long as a giraffe’s neck, yet her ability to fish out good deals on non-prescribed estrogen pills meant I was able to get the ball rolling long before a gender clinic would invite me into their waiting rooms. While our exchanges concerning medicinal access and gender dysphoria initially brought us together, further mutual standings soon made themselves apparent. We both loved superhero comics, it transpired, and it wasn’t before long that the two of us found ourselves embarking upon all-night email exchanges about the problematic implications of Iron Man as a hero, not to mention the moral dilemma’s plaguing Bruce Wayne’s mindset. Email exchanges soon morphed into video calls, as the pair of us phoned one another after the latest Doctor Who episode had aired. We voiced our thoughts on the latest companions, monsters, show runners, Doctors and narrative formats.  

For my 22^nd birthday, I invited Nat to mine. I suggested we could spend a weekend cooking, binging on our favourite shows, and trying out some of the tasty new restaurants that had recently opened up. She accepted within me minutes of messaging my suggestion to her. She topped up her fuel tank, and drove all the way across from her hometown on the outskirts of Bristol. 

Café Guru was the place we first met one another in-person.  

“We need a safe spot. Somewhere public. A form of insurance,” I suggested a week before she was set to drive down.  

“Insurance?” 

“In case one of us is an axe-wielding murderer!” I joked. 

“Ah, of course,” the confused tension escaping her speech, “pays to be safe.” 

I turned up at Café Guru an hour early on the morning of our meet-up. Calling myself a bundle of nerves might be something of an understatement. I skipped from my seat, to the toilet on at least ten occasions prior to her arrival.  

By this point, we had been chatting over messenger for over a year. In that time, I had received my degree, participated in a botched work experience program at Studio 8, moved into the damp flat that would become my home for the next decade, and started working in the HR department of an accountancy firm. Life had hoofed on forth. Meanwhile, Nat had become a fixed certainty on my mobile phone. A texting companion who would broadcast her thoughts in the form of several paragraphs once every hour. I had never heard her voice, on the account of her crippling phone anxiety. While perhaps my closest friend at the time, she was once removed from that of my daily friend group. On occasion, she felt more like an idea than a real person. To have her go from a fixed pen pal in the backdrop of my forever changing life, to a flesh and blood person sat before me, terrified me to the core. 

What if she was disappointed with me? What if I was disappointed with her. All the word play, thought out opinions and carefully crafted retorts might not work in live speech. After all, we were both self-proclaimed masters of scripted language. She an English literature with a thirst for short stories, I a graduate of academic film theory, we weren’t exactly fond of public speaking. Give us both an hour to conjure up a jape or a comeback, we’d be on fire. Our anxieties and tendency to dwell on detail meant the back-and-forth packed into our texts wasn’t likely to translate into quick whittled dialogue. 

Just parking up, read her message.  

My heart thrashed against my ribcages. My brain whizzed into action, conjuring up a thousand and one ways of greeting her. Did I kickstart matters with a quick hello, a joke, or something a little more sophisticated? Should I compare whatever she was wearing to a famous protagonist? Should I make some whimsical remarks about the glorious weather delighting this glorious Capital of ours? For that matter, would she consider London to be “glorious”? Her left leaning tendencies might make her weary of a city often locked off to the rich and elite members of our society. 

In she waltzed, as clumsy as she assured me she would be. She was tall, lanky, a little awkward in her movements. She was also beautiful, like a ditsy supermodel who had little clue how charming her heavy handed stance made her seem. Her caramel hair glistened in the sunlight, spiralling down in curls and twirls like a city of impractical highways. The thoight of her presenting as an awkward, unappealing boy just a few years prior felt impossible on first glance. She may not have quite grown into herself just yet, but a woman she was no less. 

As soon as I saw her, I knew how to play it. I had to be cooky and confident. Just play it daft. I could sense she would be a little shy and off balance. I often played that part myself, though I never liked donning that role when it was a two-person game. I shot up like a meerkat smelling a bowl of grubs, waving in her direction.  

“Ah,” she mouthed upon clocking me. She did not smile as she approached. Her head gazed at her feet as she strolled forward, as if she was making sure not to trip over them as she approached.  The hug she offered was as brief as it was trembly. As she sat, she proceeded to apologise for being a dash later than promised. She then proceeded to describe the state of traffic between Bristol and here.  

I let her waffle on about the M4 madness and middle lane cloggers for a few more minutes. I sensed her traffic updates were a means of filling time while her nerves recalibrated. She needed something to talk about while she gauged the person sat before her. I needed it too. As I nodded nod tutted along with her talk of clogged junctions and slow vehicles, I couldn’t help but marvel at her presence Here she was, in the flesh. No longer was she a mere assortment of text messages and profile pictures perched on my mobile screen. She was Natalie Carter, real life human from the Village of Cheddar. 

“I got swamped by a pigeon on the way in,” she remarked after recounting her journey here. 

“They love it around these parts,” I joked, “I guess they love the smell of fresh coffee.” 

“I did catch one of them sipping on a latte,” she continued, taking the opportunity to personify the pesky little critters.  

“You think that’s weird, last week I caught one of them bellowing through a microphone about the good book of the lord. ” 

She laughed at this, cracking her anxious shell wide open.  

As the morning turned to afternoon, the coffee shop became more hectic. Screaming kids with tired mothers, arrogant lads talking at full volume on their mobile phones, and clusters of pals cackling at one another’s jokes. Nat would later admit to being uncomfortable in such chaotic environments. On this particular morning, however, none of it phased her in the slightest. She was just happy to be here, chatting to the one girl she’d found solace in talking to during difficult times. The nerves had faded, the humour had stepped forth A fine friendship was finding itself elevating to the next level. 

It turned into our go to meeting spot on the weekends she would visit. Those oak panelled walls and industrial plumbing piped lights bore witness to our blossoming friendship. We shared ideologies, favourite films, our least favourite university modules, and most embarrassing moments after drink a few too many vodkas.  

When the time came for me to invite her to move in with me, Cafè Guru was where it happened.  

She looked as though she was going to spit her coffee over me when I asked.  

“We’ve only known one another a month!” 

“In person. We’ve been chatting for years. We’re practically best buds.” 

Nat promised she’d get back to me at a later date. Said she needed to patch a few things up at home. Mum was causing trouble. I gathered it was bad, what with how teary she’d get whenever talking about her.  

I didn’t hear from her all that much in the days after I asked. I sobbed like a fool, certain I’d squandered our entire friendship.  

You’re right, we’re best buds. I’m in, read her text message three days later.  

Practically made for one another, I sent in return.  

Our fates were locked. 

“You should start up a podcast,” Callum suggested one afternoon.  

We’d just seen the latest Star Trek movie. I liked their decision to tweak Khan’s origin. Nat saw it to be a middle finger to the entire franchise. We locked linguistic horns and engaged in a word dispute. Callum heard us as he swept around us, grinning as he eavesdropped. 

Nat’s eye lit up at Callum’s remark.  

“We could fuse literary and fim theory with pop culture!” she squealed. 

I scoffed at the notion. “Dunno if I have the mental bandwidth for that.”  

“As if. It could be a leftie film review show.” 

“What, Marvel meets Marxism?” I joked. 

“Exactly!”  Whether she was ignoring or overlooking the irony in my comment, I’ll never know.  

The more we mused over the problems of Tony Stark as a protagonist, or the evolving politics of the BBC’s longest-running science fiction drama, the more motivated Nat became. She started bringing a tatty, pink note bad to every coffee session. 

“What are you doing?”  

“Just making a note for a future episode,” she replied, her tongue stuck halfway out as she scribbled down whatever pseudo intellectual humdrum I’d just offered up.    

As I cross the road at the far end of Peppercorn Lane, I glance back at the student homes. The girl is no longer perched by the window. Perhaps she’s popped off to make a cup of tea whilst waiting for her mysterious pen pal to respond. Might she be pondering a future meet-up with the recipient in question?

Maybe someday, the person on the receiving end of her exchanges will be visiting her in her student accommodation. They could go on to share a home together, plan podcasts in a nearby coffee house, and spout nonsense about anthropomorphic birds pottering about in the streets before them.

The London traffic hisses and groans as it sails across the carpets of concrete littering the surrounding metropolis. Out here the world is cold, noisy and damp. I continue to think about the girl and her potential pen pal. How I wish I was her, messaging and hoping for a future full of potential. Gazing forth in hope is surely better than looking back in despair.

After all, the promises of tomorrow outweigh the regrets of yesterday.

Go to Act Two