You Could Have Been Anything

She finishes writing at four-fifty and it isn’t dark yet, not even close. Summer feels smaller here, but days longer, she’s noticed. It’s distinctly different than it is back home; less grand, yet more saturated, a vague quality that lots of things here seem to possess, or at least she’s perceived them to.

Shutting her laptop with satisfaction, she rises to her feet and pads through the kitchen, lit brilliantly with late sunlight spotlighting the crumbs from the morning’s toast and the spot of milk from the afternoon’s tea. The flat is still as she moves through it, even the familiar shadows seem delicately paused in anticipation, waiting for her to leave so that they can begin to creep slowly down the wall in her absence.

In the bathroom she showers quickly, a sliver of filtered sun poised like a barcode on her bare stomach, running the piece of black pepper soap directly over her skin, up and down, back and forth, remembering how the soap isn’t hers as she stands naked inside the tub that isn’t hers. A shallow thought passes, of whether her life has remained hers in this strange city, where she's washing her body to go for drinks at a foreign bar with a group of people who don’t have her accent.

James isn’t home from work yet and won’t be for a while. Of course he hasn’t indicated this, but his absence is more than likely today. She’s spent enough Friday nights without him to understand that whatever he does these evenings is probably “required” of him by work, at least that’s what she tells herself. Since moving in with him, she’s outgrown the distrust she’d previously held. One day it had just seemed like such a flimsy, brittle feeling, pointless in the long run. She finds now that blind trust is much easier and less problematic. Either he’s seeing someone or he isn’t, and the older she gets the more she realizes that even if he is, things like that aren’t her problems to solve.

She shaves her legs. Slips on a thin blue and white linen dress with a hand-sewn edge design, something very Copenhagen she hopes, and shakes a few crumpled receipts out of her favorite leather purse. Finds her copy of the flat’s keys and throws them inside habitually along with her visa identification card. Puts on a pair of nude flats and stops then for a moment, ready with her back against the door, imagining the imminent sweet bite of air outside, the fragrant late summer flowers, the buzz of men and women leaving work, arriving home with hungry bellies and an acute eagerness for the weekend. She opens the door and thinks about afterward, after the train pulls into the station, after she finds the pub, sits down in a booth, after she orders a drink, after she’s downed four, after she’s felt misunderstood, after she’s regretted not bringing a jacket, after she thinks fuck it, after she goes dancing, after someone’s made eyes at her, after she bums a cigarette, after the taxi home, after she’s fallen asleep.

The door’s deadbolted and she’s outside in the city again, adjusting herself to it. That peculiar feeling washes over her as the breeze licks her skin, that sudden awareness that she’s been cooped up all day inside a humid flat on a brilliant summer day, missing out on everything happening on the other side of the double-glazed windowpanes. Regret, waste, the passing of time. Ten weeks have gone by and she hasn’t changed. Nothing’s happened, she thinks, walking down the high road through a flock of pigeons, nothing at all has happened. Yet simultaneously she does feel within her a thread of difference, unsure of whether it’s situational, London imposing itself upon her, or internal, like a seed of personal change blooming and then blossoming in the pit of her stomach.

She minds the gap and queues Fiona Apple. On the journey, she watches the way her tinted reflection warps in the glass across the carriage’s interior, the seat opposite empty but framed by two large men. It’s loud, unbearably so, but she doesn’t cover her ears. The train rounds the bend and screams into the station. Her reflection’s replaced with amber light and the blurred faces of waiting strangers.

Outside the station it’s a smidge brighter, the surrounding buildings’ shadows stretching a bit further, but the sky overhead still a blinding bluish glow, the sun trying to last as long as it can, desperately hoping to be remembered when the nighttime comes. The pub’s only a couple blocks north and a short weave through an alley, she remembers, having been once before. She’s dodging businesspeople left and right - the sidewalk’s narrow and jagged and nobody’s adhering to one side of it or the other like they do where she’s from.

She thinks of James switching his monitors off, all five of them. The empty office floor, the lights out early, everybody relieved that it’s Friday once again. He’s pressing the elevator button and extending his arm through the opening to hold it for Jane, the receptionist. Then he’s on the rooftop bar with a tall pint in hand, sleeves rolled up and looking out at the Thames. Old Alec’s going on about his redundancy, or Chris, she can’t recall which one’s been chosen, only that James is jealous of the guy. Of course, she imagines this scene and relishes building it in her mind, constructing a reality just a few miles south of where she’s walking now. With abundant ease she’s always been able to imagine moments like this, for him, for her friends, for her parents, for anyone, just not herself. She’s always stuck where she is. Life’s endlessly frustrating like that, she thinks; you should have the ability to fully forget who you are once in a while and believe you’re somewhere else living a completely different life.

Polly’s inside at the table. Sharp, pretty, extremely sure of herself. Fatima is at the bar with Henry, both calm and unabrasive and attentive. The pub’s got all its windows open and the sunbaked wooden surfaces shine with what’s left of the daylight.

As she sees them, she’s struck with a fair sense of surprise at how deeply she admires these new friends, how she finds herself drawn to them and their allure. They aren’t at all like the friends she had in college - they’re unafraid and interesting in ways she wishes to be. They listen to new bands she doesn’t know, have visited places she’s never seen, speak languages she’s never heard aloud, and write stories by which she feels unexpectedly seen.

Polly watches her enter and lights up, grinning and offering her a chair. She takes it and promptly a beer’s set down in front of her, courtesy of Henry. A hefty Camden Hells with a bit of foam spilling over the rim. He returns to the bar after answering her thanks with a friendly wink. She wonders, watching his foot rest on the brass rail across the room, whether he’d been anticipating her arrival and ordered the beer, or if he’s just being gentlemanly and offering his own, which raises the question of which scenario is the preferable one - she isn’t sure.

Moments later he comes back to the table, ears and eyebrows pricked to the already dramatic conversation between Polly and Fatima about their mental flatmate with insomnia and presumed schizophrenia. Sensing that she and Henry would rather not revisit the flatmate stories they’d heard the week prior in the same pub, the two clip the discussion and save their shared disdain for later.

For the next hour, the four of them discuss sympathetically the varying things that feel important in their lives. Fatima speaks of her writer’s block and the worry of not setting her novel in Lebanon, where she grew up, wondering if that’s the reason she can’t come up with a convincing plot. Polly is afraid her twin older sisters overshadow her with their corporate success the same way they did with their athletic prowess a decade ago, that she fears whatever story she’s trying to write is insignificant, self-indulgent in comparison, even if it’s not what she believes. Henry says he’s still upset with himself for losing his temper with a patron at his cafe job on Monday, how uncharacteristic he believes it was of him, and then how that guilt keeps compounding on itself the longer he ruminates over it, yet he can’t switch it off. She tells them how she’s chronically unsure of her relationship, how she’s unsure of London, unsure of what she’s doing there or what she wants her life to look like. But the venting feels numb, useless, like when she’s watching a movie and relating intensely to the characters’ problems but knowing that those problems were constructed in somebody’s head and acted out in front of a camera. Ultimately, they could never help her solve anything because they aren't real.

Though it reminds her of a pivotal scene in Lost in Translation when Charlotte, or Scarlett Johansson, is lying on the bed with Bill Murray staring at the ceiling. She says plainly, “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.” And whether it was meant one way or another, she had always figured, or perhaps hoped that the sentence expressed more than just one-dimensional career uncertainty; there was something deeper in the delivery, the hopelessness with which she said it. The first time she watched the film, she felt that the words defined her whole existence, not simply the dread of graduating from college and figuring out what job to get or where to live. At the most fundamental level she’d always wondered, who was she supposed to be?

The group is four beers deep, bantering playfully about the origin of a multilayered meme from TikTok or Twitter. She’s not fully aware of the previous evolutions of the joke, only the most recent, so she can’t contribute much to the debate aside from a few bits of appropriate laughter. When she rises to visit the toilet, she realizes she’s drunk.

In the mirror she makes faces, pokes her flushed cheeks and analyzes how yellow her teeth look as if she’s spontaneously awoken in someone else’s body. There’s no use in reapplying makeup; it’s dark enough in the pub now and shortly they’ll head somewhere even darker. She relieves herself and rinses her hands, wondering at which point in life she’d had the most freedom and discovering that it was probably all the times she could actively live in the present, however long ago that was.

Twenty minutes after she rejoins the table, they collectively decide to visit the Sainsbury’s across the street and grab a bottle of wine to share. Back outside, Henry voices his preference to walk the twenty minutes to the club, but he’s outvoted by the women, who in their inebriation prefer Lime e-bikes as their mode of transport, insisting it’ll be a laugh. Quickly they gulp down the bottle’s contents one after another, passing it around next to the long rack of bicycles.

The bottle’s lobbed into the adjacent dumpster and they mount their bikes. She’s the caboose in their procession down the road, drunkenly dodging cars and buses and pedestrians and somehow not getting flattened. Flying through the warm night, she feels the thrill of anticipation and the sudden disappointment that it’s fleeting, that after the club the night will be over, just like the train ride before the pub was over, just like the second drink was over before the third, just like her relationship and whatever point she’s at now in it, some indeterminable distance from its end. All of this makes her feel delightedly rotten.

They insert their bikes into the locking systems on the rack around the corner from the club, the faint thumping sound of its interior permeating the brick building whose basement it sits in. Neither short nor long, the queue is dotted with people who look cooler than she ever could, even with a lot of help and meticulous direction. She’s grown accustomed to seeing this type in London, envying them, despising them, deeming them shallow or performative, when the reality is that she’s simply upset that they seem to naturally possess something she doesn’t.

In the queue, the four discuss how clubs stopped feeling like they did when they were younger. Henry and Polly, both English, have been going dancing for nearly a decade, before they even turned eighteen. Fatima recounts the Beirut rave scene, of which she was a dedicated part during her late teen years and abruptly abandoned following a near overdose of ecstasy one New Year’s. They admit that their bodies can’t quite take it anymore, at least to the extent they used to, staying up past four in the morning and sleeping till mid-afternoon thrice a week. She feels a sense of inadequacy and regret that she missed out on things like that as a young person, guilty that she can’t identify with the three of them and their wayward stories. In her late teens, the most rebellious thing she’d done was sit at home and sneak bottles of wine into her bedroom, most of the time just leading to lengthier-than-normal masturbation sessions and a dreamless sleep.

Nonetheless, here they are together, in their late twenties, approaching the bouncer for admission into a club that is undoubtedly going to be much too loud and crowded for her tastes. Just ahead of her, the three of them are granted access with little more than a nod from a thick, balding man in black. She reaches inside her purse, feeling around blindly for her visa, the only form of ID she tends to bring around, given that her driver’s license expired over the summer and her passport is far too precious to risk losing.

The longer she takes to fish it out, the further the bouncer’s eyes roll back in his head, but she can’t seem to locate it. Makeup bag, chapstick, Airpods, tampons, keys, wallet, there it is. But for some reason the card’s missing from her wallet, she finds, frantically digging through the various other cards in it and apologizing to the attractive couple behind her dressed entirely in black. Henry peers around the corner from inside the club, curious of the holdup, but she waves him inside graciously, watching his eyebrows raise and two thumbs pop up as he disappears back into the darkness. She decides suddenly that it’s time to leave, that if she really thinks about it, she doesn’t want to go inside anyway.

Not far down the empty street, the last overground train of the night passes languorously over the bridge with its trance-like rhythm. Golden streetlights over rubbish bins, scampering insects and rats, leaves shaking on trees with an urgent violence in the wind. From the bus stop she watches it all, alone. She’s looking at her reflection again, this time in the stop directly opposite, for the route’s northbound direction. Small and hollow and helpless, she thinks she looks. Or hopeless. She wonders if James’ll be in bed when she returns, if she’ll be hungover tomorrow, if she’ll magically feel any different about the world when she opens her eyes again. Every night she seems to expect answers to appear out of thin air, be it from her friends, a song, a book, a TikTok, a text message, a presidential address even. Perhaps what she expects is to wake up and see a letter on the floor addressed to her, dropped anonymously through the slit in the door overnight. Ideally, it’d be hyperspecific instructions tailored to her life, providing her with the answers to questions she could feel twisting in her gut but couldn’t quite put to words. It definitely wouldn't say something vague and simple, something like what the mural she’s staring at now says, the one behind the bus stop across the street - You Could Be Anything - except it’s been marked up with spray paint to say You Could Have Been Anything.

She contemplates which version of the now tastefully cynical mural she would prefer to be more true. Before its defacement, the untouched display exhibited a sort of perpetual optimism that to her, is uncharacteristic of humanity. No matter how hard you try you can’t truly be anything you want and it’s naive to think so. She’s hyperaware of the limitations under which she grew up, where she was raised, the people who taught her right and wrong, what to value and what to ignore. It seems to her that she would have to accomplish the impossible to become anything - to return to the womb, to unwind time and not become herself.

Riding the bus, she feels that these days life is just waiting for one thing to end and another thing to start, but just never knowing when. Perhaps it’s always been this way, but she’d been too distracted to recognize the pattern.

Later, she takes her time inserting her key into the lock, rotating it, pushing the door open and letting the light seep in. In the dim blue interior she sets her purse on the radiator cover, slips off her flats, and shuts the door behind her, aware more sharply now of her intoxication. Beneath her bare toes she feels something small and thin lying on the floor where the mail would usually fall in through the letterbox. She bends down to pick it up and squints at its flimsy rectangular form, trying to make out what it could be. Slowly her eyes adjust to the hall’s darkness and at the same time she understands what it is she’s holding. In a whisper, she reads her full name at the top of the card and cracks a smile, bringing it into the bedroom, where she sleeps uninterrupted and alone for ten and a half hours.