double, you, see.

CW: Suicide or self harm, substance abuse, physical violence, gore

Oh, no cocaine for me, thanks. I just wanted to be in this tiny bathroom with you guys. Oh, no thank you - I like to avoid vaping because I have a deep-seated fear of carbon monoxide and the average e-cigarette contains traces of metals which can form toxic hexavalent chromium (Cr VI, neurotoxin) when heated up.

It’s exciting to me when you bend over the sink to spread powder the colour of stale yeast into uniform lines with the folded corner of your co-operative food receipt. It’s even more so when your nostrils flare and you strike a leg back to steady yourself, the cuff of your trousers brushing the skin of my bare leg. I feel so dizzy that you giggle in disbelief that I am a sober woman.

It is a sweaty, jejune evening, and there are too many of us in this confined space even with one girl hitched over the lavatory bowl to urinate/throw up. Her pointy pink shoulder is in my boob and my cheek is thunked against a grimy plaster wall that smells like the Landjäger sausage I ate during my student gap year in Vienna (Taken after university - not before). Though when I take a second whiff I consider that it might be the pee/puke and not the paint job assaulting my sinuses. There is a woman speaking to me somewhere but I am so far shoved into this wall that I can’t even turn my head to identify her. We are talking about male seahorses? Piss-vomit girl is a marine biologist and has a video on her phone of one of them popping out bundles of tiny babies, but she can’t remember her password. At that, you tip your head back and chitter like a chickadee. Your heel knocks back painfully into my shin, and you crane your head so that I’ll be able to look into your face as you grin and offer your apology.

I want to tell you to shut up and kick me until I don’t have any blood vessels in my body left for you to burst, but that feels like it would be socially inappropriate. I stare at the rightside of your neck in lieu of this misstep.

There is a little cut on the side of your face - from shaving, it seems. I wonder if that means you might wake up some days with a lady beard the same dark curl as your wild hair. Or maybe you squeezed a whitehead a little too hard with your bumblebee acrylic nails, little jewels of blood bubbling up to join the spit of oil. Did it sting? I wonder it with great sincerity and some urgency. I could ask. I am not going to.

The drum of my one working airpod beats over the side of my face like a heated fandango - my right-brain is juiced and pulsing and my left-brain is dull and lifeless; a cold plunge and a wet room. I suppose it’s lucky that I never put much trust in my general cognitive awareness to begin with - I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a pigeon in a coal mine. Or an ostrich. Or a goat.

Perhaps I am just another strange and perverse young lady sitting in a dingy bathroom with several slightly dingy strangers who keep resting their hips and elbows on the curve of her pelvis like she is a nice plush armchair. I wish I could say I had the self respect to mind.

Once, while traveling the Northern London underground, a man fell asleep on my shoulder with such ease and contentment that I was still frozen with shock by the time my stop pulled in (Camden Town - hub of the goths). I couldn’t get off there, nor at King’s Cross Station, or London Bridge, or Waterloo, or Tottenham Court Road. I passed through Angel, Euston, Highgate, Hampstead, Balham, then the next and so on. I rode the train to the end of the line and then sat in the stationary carriage for eleven minutes while he slept on, his breath a warm and sour tide against my neck, before the driver came through and we both startled awake and the man looked at me with an expression of such clean and total horror that I had to press my face into my scarf all the way home so that nobody would see that I was not horrified at all.

At my sixth birthday party I walked up to another little girl on the bouncy castle and asked if she would break all my toes. She wouldn’t. I cried.

I’ve been thinking up this theory on déjà vu, and it’s not a glitch in memory retrieval or a misfiring of the parahippocampal gyrus (though it is also that). I think it is the precise moment when one small decision - to stay, to go, to choke your face against a wall that smells like cured meat, to ride the train past your stop - causes the universe to crack cleanly down the middle like a wishbone and splinter off into a new direction. A path that was not there before. I always hope, when the feeling comes, that I am the version of myself who ended up in the good ending. The one where things accrete into something. The good ending is not a fixed point; it just means: not the other one. Though of course the good ending only means anything at all because the bad ending exists in exact and equal proportion somewhere else - some other bathroom, some other train, some other version of me who did not miss her stop and made it to the thing she was supposed to make it to and met the person and so on and so on, the usual mechanics of a life assembling itself correctly.

Your heel is still warm against my shin where you kicked it. I think about that. I think about how many universes hinge on something as small and accidental and unmeant as that - the cuff of a trouser, the brush of a leg, a man’s breath against a neck on the last train going north. The marine biologist has remembered her password. She holds the seahorse up and it pops and pops and pops, each small creature unfurling into the water like a fist opening, and we all watch it together with our faces lit pale blue and I feel, stupidly, like crying - not in a bad way - in the way you feel like crying when you are certain, for one vertiginous second, that you are on the right side of the split. That this is the good corridor. That some small and unremembered thing you did or didn’t do has landed you, specifically, here: in this hot terrible bathroom, watching new life come out of a fish on someone’s phone.

I don’t tell you any of this. You are already looking away.