Day 4

Sundays are for coffee and bookstores. They’re for wandering stacks and touching every book with a pretty cover or a catchy title as if to say, I see you there. Your words are important to me. I’ll read you someday, I swear, it’s just it’s Sunday and the evening is coming and time and leaving…

Sunday is the day you’ve been waiting for this entire long, heartsick year.

It’s home and it’s church family and it’s God and it’s knowing all the things you know for sure and it’s being surrounded by people who believe in it too.

It’s safety. It’s peace. It’s feeling all the things you feel and never doubting for a second and it’s that once a week Sunday evening certainty that has carried you through week after week.

Your Sundays are made up of faith and truth and goodness and you can keep that even when you aren’t in London. It means the same thing.

Day 5

Today is Ophelia and orange skies. It’s errands and banking and groceries. It’s taking the tube all over the city and laughing at myself for thinking I’d forgotten it all.

It’s like I’ve never left and it’s sadness because how do I get back.

It’s saudade and it’s fado music in the living room with friends who are family because they never stop welcoming.

It’s late night talks with Joana and it’s digging deep and it’s laughing over one guy and crying over the other.

Today is feelings. Today is peace.

Today is knowing I’m home and feeling that I’m free and needing to be here, in this moment now and smiling from within.

Day 6

Brick Lane. Hanbury Street. The Overground. Rosa’s. The market with the vintage clock pieces. The magazine shop tucked into the corner. The pub you and Danny found near Highbury and Islington.

The store with the fancy pens that you walked to that day when you had no money to get to work so you stayed home and cried and the only thing you could afford to do was to walk down your street and back.

When life is hard, you write and when you can’t afford a pen to write with, you walk to the fancy pen store and you dream about writing. You promise yourself someday you will be able to afford all of the pens and all of the ink and you will sit in a cafe and order a latte and you will write about all the feelings you’ve ever, ever had.

You had no idea what was coming around the corner.

More pens, more feelings.

***