In Porridge Magazine

Walking, Encumbered: Dispatches (Excerpt)

I am on the bus, now. There is a man, late twenties, cute, sitting opposite me. And he is looking at me. Glancing furtively, then away again whenever he catches my eye. It takes me a moment to register what is going on. I am thirty-seven, but I look younger. I am wearing a bright red jumper, a skirt and sneakers. I carry a small brown bag, and I am reading a book. (‘Girls who read’, a subset of girl-types that appeals to certain men. Before, when a new encounter was an ever-present possibility, I would have been semi-conscious of what I was signalling. Now I am just reading. But he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know anything about me.) I feel a jolt, a re-awakening. A forgotten way of being in the world courses through me: one in which the contours of lived experience were defined by a feeling of possibility, more than by minutes of actuality.

I think of Baudelaire’s stranger, the mysterious passerby. Oh, you who I would have loved! Was she, also, on her way home to mouths that suck at her breast and soft heads that rest on her soft stomach?

Read the full piece here.