You should know, before we go further (and we are going further, Driver, whether you have fastened your seatbelt or not), that this particular car is a Renault, large and French and parked in a tight car park in Tuscany, wedged between a Fiat that has seen better decades and a stone wall that has seen better centuries, filled with four friends squeezed into its body like ingredients into a jar. You should also know that you do not, technically, know how to drive it. Don’t panic. This will not stop you. Nothing, you believe, should ever stop anyone from driving a car they do not know how to drive. This is, in fact, how driving as an activity began, with someone looking at a machine and thinking: nah, surely it can’t be that difficult, surely the gap between the not knowing and the knowing is small enough to leap across without looking down? And you, my friend, are about to take your place in that long unbroken lineage of confident people confidently doing a thing for the first time, with confidence.

Turn the key. There. The engine catches, coughs once like a smoker waking up, then settles into its idle. Now you are somewhere you were not a moment ago, which is to say: nowhere at all, still parked, still wedged between the Fiat and the wall, yet already changed, already different. You are in the space now between potential and kinetic energy, that threshold that exists only in physics textbooks and in moments like this, when the car is running but not yet moving, when you are a driver but have not yet driven. This is the moment, Driver, when you could still change your mind. You could turn the key back, give it to the person in the passenger seat, return to being a person who is not driving, who has never driven this car, who is innocent of this experience. But you won't.

You will pull away from the car park in a moment. First, notice that motion itself - the outrageous fact of moving through space under your own steering, the miracle of it - is one of the primary ways you, a person, get to feel like a person. You knew this once, as a child, on a bicycle, going downhill with your feet off the pedals for no reason except that it was possible, for no reason except that the wind was in your face and the world was blurring past and you were, for those few seconds, faster than you had any right to be. You knew it in your stomach, that feeling of joy mixed with terror. You knew it in the way you laughed, or screamed, or did both at once, that sound that comes out of children when they are more alive than they know how to handle. Where did that feeling go, oh Driver? When did driving become something you do while thinking about other things, while talking on the phone, while eating a sandwich, while being anywhere but here?

Consider, before you release the clutch, the first person ever to ride a horse. Before it was ordinary, it must have been unbearable. The first humans on horseback must have been beside themselves! And I mean this literally, dear Driver, as they must have felt like they had left their bodies behind, like their souls were struggling to keep up with their flesh. Some unrecorded soul, several thousand years ago, up on an animal that had never before been asked to carry a person anywhere, an animal that was probably not best thrilled about it, thinking something with the approximate emotional content of oh no oh no oh no. And you have to assume they did not handle it well. There would have been vomiting. There always is, at the beginning of every leap forward humanity makes; it is simply not written into the history books, which prefer to begin the story at the triumphant part. The first person in an elevator probably threw up. The Wright brothers most certainly threw up. You, Driver, might have thrown up the first time you went fast enough to feel it, though you were probably too young to remember, and your parents probably cleaned it up and never mentioned it, because why would they?

Only later, once the first rider had recovered and dismounted and stopped shaking, did someone else look at the horse and think: ah yes, we could also use this to hit people, or outrun them, or entertain them. This is the second stage of every human invention, arriving close behind the first. First the discovery that we can move faster, then the discovery that moving faster means we can reach our enemies before they reach us, or reach them with more force, or reach them at all when previously they were safely out of reach. The horse, the chariot, the sail, the wheel, the engine, the large stubborn Renault beneath you now: every leap in how fast one could move was also a leap in how alive one could feel. You have simply built enough of these leaps, one on top of the other, that you no longer notice you are standing on a very tall and very messy pile of them, a tower of accumulated velocities that reaches from the first horse to this Renault, to you, here, now.

Okay. Release the clutch. You are moving.

Notice, as the road unspools with no signage (or at least none that you notice, you are on edge, poor Driver), as the buildings turn to trees, that both your hands are occupied and most of your attention is occupied, but one small corner of your mind is left free - unemployed, ownerless, gloriously off duty - whose only task is to observe that you are, in fact, extremely happy. In the way you are when you are doing something that requires just enough of your attention that you cannot spend it on anything else, cannot worry, cannot plan, cannot rehearse or replay or wonder. Happy in the way that is really just the absence of unhappiness, but there are no good words for it, because we call it happiness when it is really just being here, being now, being in your body instead of in your head.

This is not nothing, Driver, don’t roll your eyes at me. This is everything. This is the corner of the mind that will light up when you listen to Louie play the piano later that evening, in a room that smells of sunshine and herbs. It is the same corner that lights up when you chop vegetables slightly too fast, when you are aware that you could cut yourself but you probably won't. It is the same corner that lights up when you swim without counting laps, when you have been swimming long enough that you have forgotten you are swimming, when all you have to do is watch the tiles slide past on the bottom of the pool, so fast that the pattern blurs. It is the same corner that lit up when you were reading a book to your friend - this book, perhaps, Driver, right now - and you read long enough that you forgot you were reading, forgot that you were looking at symbols on a page and translating them into meaning, and you were simply there, in the story, in the pool, in the car, moving.

The Stoics (ironically, yes, Driver, you are right to notice the irony, the Stoics who famously rise above this emotion you are so wonderfully feeling) had a word for this particular flavour of calm - eupatheia, or chara, maybe - an engaged stillness, quite distinct from the passive, horizontal, feet-up variety of rest most people mean when they think of the word relax. From them you understand that the mind is quietest when the body is most occupied, that peace comes not from emptiness but fullness. Though it is safe to assume none of them ever got to feel it going too fast with the windows down, at a volume just barely too loud for the car's own good, doing absolutely nothing of consequence, doing something that felt, for forty minutes, like the entire point of having a body in the first place. How very Stoic of you, Driver. How very un-Stoic. How very both at once.

You will arrive somewhere eventually. You always do. The yellow dollhouse at the top of the hill is waiting for you, has been waiting for you. It is a destination too perfect for anyone’s daily life, this house, too yellow, too unclouded, a house which seems to come furnished with a little plastic family glued lightly to the warm furniture, displaying the proportions of a thing built for much smaller and more decorative forms of life. It is, and you think this with total sincerity, a magical place, one which violates some law of aesthetics or probability simply by being real, the way a very good coincidence violates your sense of what the world is allowed to do. And those who stay there live in it the way you'd expect the little family glued to this little dollhouse to inhabit such a space, which is to say the perfect size for it, the way light stays in a room after the sun that put it there has already set.

But don’t get excited. That arrival is not yet. For now you are still on the road, still thirty-five minutes from anywhere in particular, or thirty, or twenty-five, time is doing something strange here, Driver, have you noticed? Time is stretching and compressing the way it does when you are paying attention, when you are here instead of somewhere else, in a present moment so full that it seems to contain more time than it should, larger on the inside than the outside. And this - this exact, unrepeatable stretch of tarmac, this large French machine singing under you, your friends giggling in your right ear about something you were allowed to forget or perhaps never heard (you are deaf, dear Driver, I must have forgotten to tell you), this corner of your mind that watches you being happy, doing this thing you will only do once in this exact way and never again - is the part that matters. Everything after this is just parking.

PATRICK: This chair is from IKEA. I can tell because the metal frame has that specific Swedish cheapness that reminds me of Paul Allen’s summer house in the Hamptons, which was decorated entirely by his Canadian interior designer who went to Europe last summer and dyed his hair platinum. It has a wobble, an annoying tilt to the left that’s making my right ass cheek work harder than my left, which is going to create an imbalance in my glute development that will take weeks to correct. The man across from me is Dan, Dean, Don, or whatever his name is, I don’t actually know or care, I just know he’s the guy from Splash who orders vodka soda and screams in my ear that his go-to karaoke song is “It’s Raining Men” – so terribly basic it almost offends me – and his tie is Hermès but it’s that pattern they discontinued in ’68, which means he either bought it vintage or he’s been wearing the same ties for fifteen years (both options make me squirm), and Keith is talking, saying something about “safe spaces,” and I’m thinking about the Stoli in my freezer, and there’s a woman here named Linda wearing a sweatshirt that says “Virginia is for Lovers” and she’s crying, I mean jesus, properly crying with mascara running down her face like a Rorschach test, and I’m calculating the cost of everyone’s clothing in this room – Linda’s sweatshirt maybe a generous $15 from a rest stop, Jerry’s Dockers are $40 from JCPenney, Keith’s cardigan is probably $60 from L.L.Bean, and Dean is wearing at least $6,000 worth of clothing and accessories, not including his shoes, which are Church’s oxfords, recently resoled – and I’m thinking about my bone-coloured business card, the one that’s better than David Van Patten’s eggshell colouring and Romalian type, and certainly McDermott’s, which was just outright trashy, and I’m thinking about how I need a drink right now, immediately, desperately, or so help me God.

DON: Keith is asking me to share and I’m putting on my Lucky-Strike-working-late-with-Midge-Daniels face, and I’m saying “I’m Don, I’m an alcoholic,” and the words taste like copper, and I’m talking about my marriages – plural, duh, Betty and Megan and probably someone else I’m forgetting – and how I’ve hurt people, my wives, my girlfriends, my mistresses, a couple secretaries, and Patrick is watching me like I’m a tennis match, and he knows I’m bullshitting because he’s seen me sticking my hips out to “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Keith is nodding like I’ve said something profound and it’s 6:47 and I need to be at the Carlyle by 7:30. Patrick looks incredible.

PATRICK: Doug is a crappy liar. What an idiot. I’ve spent my entire life lying – about where I went to school (I tell people I don’t like that it was Columbia but it was actually Harvard), my apartment, my body count (audaciously higher than I prefer to let on), my net worth, everything – and Keith is asking me to share and I stand up to show off my posture (I’ve been doing Pilates twice a week with an instructor who trained Gwyneth Paltrow’s stunt double.) “Hi, I’m Patrick,” blah blah. I discuss stress, my job, mergers and acquisitions, Allen landing the Fisher account, which netted Pierce & Pierce $4.2 million in fees, and nobody’s even reacting to this, in fact Linda is still crying, Jerry is nodding like a bobblehead you see in non-English speaking taxis, and Dan is examining his cuticles like they’re the Zapruder film, and I’m thinking about whether he was a good kisser, about whether he would get into Le Cirque or Dorsia or Nell’s, that the difference between a $5,000 suit and a $5,500 suit is the difference between being human and animal, and Dave catches my eye and mouths something, and he’s looking at me, presumably winking.

This may not immediately strike you as the sort of confession that ought to arrive with any degree of dramatic weight. After all, people reveal vastly more intimate things every day: photographs, messages, diary entries. Yet I remain convinced that there are certain forms of exposure which appear trivial only because we have not yet developed the language necessary to describe their significance, and playlists belong firmly within that category.

For what is a playlist, really, if not a record of prolonged attention? Not a collection of songs – at least not merely that – but a slow accumulation of preferences, associations, memories, moods, recurring fascinations, emotional habits, and private systems of meaning?

I have often suspected that the things we care about most reveal themselves not through what we explicitly say about ourselves, but through the peculiar patterns of attention we leave behind. The books with folded corners. The photographs we cannot quite bring ourselves to delete. The routes we walk when nobody is watching. The cafés we always seem to end up in. The songs we return to so frequently that they cease to be songs and become, instead, forms of orientation and feeling. I use some songs to measure distance between versions of myself. There are songs that belong entirely to being nineteen, driving on a specific road, school bus journeys, exam periods, certain windows. There are songs that remind me of specific friends, specific animals, specific colours, specific hairstyles, specific meals, specific aspirations.

If this sounds excessive, I can only respond that human beings have always relied upon stranger objects for guidance. An example that comes to mind is that people have long possessed the tendency to consult birds, watching their movements in the sky and believing they revealed something about the structure of reality. Roman augurs studied flight paths before political decisions, sailors watched migrations, farmers read seasons according to the behaviour of swallows. The birds themselves mattered less than the meaning people discovered through paying attention to them. Human beings have always searched for orientation outside themselves. We have always taken fragments of the world – stars, rivers, tea leaves, weather patterns, dreams, bones, smoke, clouds, the behaviour of animals and tides – to help us understand where we are.

Sure, the modern playlist is perhaps a less dramatic instrument than the flight of ravens over a battlefield, but the principle remains the same. The vulnerability of sharing a playlist does not arise from embarrassment but interpretation. It is to grant temporary access to the strange, largely invisible architecture through which meaning accumulates in your life. The experience resembles inviting somebody into your home only to discover that what they are examining is not the furniture but its arrangement, not the books but the order in which they have been placed on the shelves. Suddenly the object itself becomes secondary, and what is being observed is the shape of your attention.

The problem began when my friend noticed a playlist named Paul Simon. The playlist, it should be said, contains remarkably little Paul Simon (/and Garfunkel). Four songs, perhaps five. Certainly enough to establish his presence, yet nowhere near enough to satisfy the very specific, lapidary expectations that the title appears, on the surface, to create. My friend found this absurd. If a playlist so fruitful, so plural, so apparently abundant in its multitudinous offerings is called Paul Simon, they argued, then surely the listener is entitled to expect a substantial quantity of Paul Simon. Anything less represents a failure of categorisation. This seemed to them less a matter of taste than of competence, which was rather offensive, actually.

If your understanding of a playlist is that it should describe its contents, then I can understand, a playlist called Paul Simon containing mostly people who are not Paul Simon appears to have failed at its most basic task. Misleading, even.

But I've never believed that names exist primarily to describe. Description is the job of labels, which belong on storage boxes and spreadsheets and old tupperware. They exist to make things retrievable. This is, of course, partially useful. Society would become difficult rather quickly if every street, building, person, object, and institution abandoned descriptive clarity altogether.

Names, however, should also locate a thing within a particular corner of reality. They should consecrate the nameless thing. A name, a proper one, arrived at through genuine encounter with the thing being named, should describe the field of feeling that surrounds it, the weather it exists in. This is why the most accurate names often appear, from the outside, slightly inaccurate. They make sense only to those who participated in their creation.

I am reminded that the naming of things is one of the oldest human compulsions, that we named the stars not to catalogue them but because an unnamed thing cannot be fully loved, that Adam in the garden was not doing taxonomy but devotion, going around touching everything and saying you, you are this, and you are that, which is the first and most essential act of paying attention.

We named the wind – the Mistral, the Sirocco, the Tramontane – because a wind with a name becomes a character. It becomes something you can get to know, or dress for in advance. You can dread it and respect it and tell people who have not experienced it what it is actually like, which you cannot do with a wind that has no name because a nameless thing cannot be described except by pointing at it, and it is very difficult to point at a wind.

We named the months after gods and emperors not because gods and emperors were particularly useful categories but because time, unnamed, is merely weather, cold then less cold then briefly warm and then the whole miserable thing again. We named storms. We named swords. We named ships. We named horses. We named trains. We named clocks. We even named years. The Year of Our Lord. The Year of the Rat. The Year Without a Summer. Once upon a time people seemed to understand that if you were going to spend enough time with something, the least you could do was learn what to call it.

Parents sit with a child not yet born and feel around in the dark for the word that already fits the person they haven't met, which is an almost impossible task and leads some of them to change the name after the baby arrives, which is, incidentally, the most sophisticated act of naming most people will ever perform – the recognition that a name must be discovered rather than assigned, that it already exists somewhere and your job is to find it rather than invent it. I extend the same courtesy to my playlists.

Which brings us, inevitably, back to Paul Simon.

My playlist does not contain Paul so much as happen around him. It began as a handful of his songs which established a particular atmosphere, a certain emotion. Other songs arrived later, drawn into orbit by the quality of the unhurried, the warm but not saccharine, the melancholic but not despairing, music that holds you at the right distance from your own thoughts, close enough to feel held, far enough to feel free. Eventually Kiwanuka made his way in, the occasional Beatle breaking free from the mothership, Morrison in one of this more habitable moods, and lots of Siffre, obviously. Over time the original material became a minority presence within its own creation.

No, Paul is not my playlist’s most frequent inhabitant. He is, however, its centre of gravity, the reason the room exists at all. Every song that arrived afterwards entered a space whose atmosphere had already been established. The name Paul Simon does not describe the contents of the playlist, per se, but the conditions under which it came into being, the encounter that established what the playlist was, the ambience that every subsequent addition has been required to honour. I unfortunately also have many other playlists named this way: Billy Joel, The Doors, D'Angelo, Pink Floyd, which I can’t be bothered to describe, though surely you get it now.

I have been told that this is confusing by my (so-called) friends. That the names are misleading, that they set up expectations that the playlists then fail to meet, that a stranger approaching the playlist would not know what they were getting. Thank god it’s in my pocket then … crisis averted, presumably.

If you do not feel this, I recommend the name Chill Vibes. I hear it is very retrievable.

I imagine that before the platform, there was a morning. This particular morning, my grandfather packed his suitcase. He quickly ate the last of his mother’s farinata standing up at the kitchen table. She watched him in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest in the way Ligurian women hold themselves, as though warmth were a finite resource and November was suddenly looming, though it was only August. The air in the kitchen was thick with oil and salt and the windows open.

I imagine he was going north, which in Genoa would’ve meant something. Factories. Wages. Wages in the fixed sense, something you can press your back against, something that does not depend on the weather or tide. There was also a girl, maybe, though this part of the story he never told me, and stories that aren’t told have a way of becoming the most structuring ones of all.

I imagine he walked to Principe station through the caruggi, the narrow medieval corridors where the buildings lean so close overhead that the sky appears only as a stripe, grey and thin as a fish bone. The paving stones are slick with a hundred years of footsteps, and a little damp even in the summer. He passed old men playing cards outside the bar on Via del Campo, their thumbs black with tobacco, their laughter loud and unhurried. He passed the smell of pesto coming from somewhere above him – that particular green smell, basil and garlic and the oil of the Ligurian hillsides – a smell that would ambush him for the rest of his life in other cities without warning or mercy.

I imagine he did not say goodbye to the sea directly. But from the Via Balbi, before the road curved, he stopped. The Lanterna stood at its distance, the old lighthouse that has watched this coast since before there was a country to call it part of. White in the grey morning. Redundant, almost, in daylight, its purpose visible only to ships in the dark – but always there. I imagine he looked at it for a moment that was either very short or very long, the way such moments are, then turned and walked on.

At the platform, I imagine he set his suitcase down. Around him, others were also leaving. This was the fact of that decade – that Italy was eating itself from south to north, that its people were in motion like a tide that had only one direction. Men from Calabria, from Sicily, from Sardegna, from the Veneto. Some of them with more in their suitcases than he had, some with less. All of them with the same expression he wore, which was not grief but something adjacent to it. A collective flinch, I’ll say.

The train came. He got on. Did he look back at the platform? At the particular grey of the Genovese sky that day, the smell of the port coming off the water, the quality of light on the surface that belongs only to Liguria? (I’m still deciding on this.)

There is a Kierkegaardian idea that when you choose one path, all the paths you do not take are snuffed out like candles. At the moment of choice, each of them is the only way. Then, as soon as you’ve chosen, the doors of all the other ways close behind you. I don’t like to think he wanted to leave Genoa, but I imagine my grandfather was committed to this, the snuffing, the idea that this train could carry him somewhere the air was a different quality. Not necessarily better, but one to be negotiated with. A place where he could be a practical man among other practical men, instead of a mythological one standing on a boat.

Did the train carry him there? Or did it just slightly rearrange the distance between him and the sea?

I take the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, twice a month. There is a woman in the seat across from me who has fallen asleep with a boarding pass tucked into the cover of a novel, and I find this rather sweet. The train is very fast and quiet. If I look at my reflection in the window instead of the fields, I can almost believe I am the first person in my family to be carried through a landscape at such a speed.

My grandfather’s train, in 1963, was neither fast nor quiet. Its noise would have been the kind that gets into your bones, shaking the saltwater crust from your forearms. The slowness would have been the sort that forces you to sit with your decision for hours, watching the coastline fall away centimetre by centimetre on a paper map in your head.

On these journeys I keep rewriting him in my head. I give him different jackets, different regrets, different generic tutto passa tattoos on different parts of his skin. Some days it’s needled onto the inside of his wrist where it can be hidden under a watch he will soon buy in Milan, other days it runs along his forearm like the name of a ship, or curls under his collarbone where only he and a lover would see it. I move the words around the way I move him around the map, testing out who he might’ve been, until the only fixed thing seems to be the phrase itself, stubbornly following us from city to city.

I have decided that my grandfather was getting the train to Turin. I see him stepping down onto a platform that smells of diesel and metal rather than salt and fish. He worked in a plant that made car parts. The plant was a new kind of sea: noisy, dangerous, governed by shifts and production targets instead of meal times and daylight. He met my grandmother on a Sunday, outside a church, which is not where my grandmother, at twenty-one, had expected to meet anyone, as she never liked church and debated going that day. He had a photograph of the Ligurian coast in his wallet, which he showed to almost no one. The edges became curled over time. He raised three children in an apartment block in a suburb of a city that was not his city, and he raised them well, or adequately, or with whatever is available to a man whose hands were made for nets rather than tools. The windows on his walls looked out over other windows. In the evenings he leaned on the balcony rail and smoked, staring at a horizon that is made of rooftops instead of water. He learned to make pesto in the apartment’s small kitchen, though the basil was wrong and the oil was wrong and the mortar was too small, and the smell that rose was close enough to cause a subtle kind of pain.

What this cost him I never could figure out. I imagine he understood the particular tax levied on people who make a practical choice against a mythological one, paid not all at once but in small instalments. A new set of routines slowly accreting over the old, the way silt settles over the seafloor in Genoa. In October, when the light changed angle, you could sometimes see him go briefly somewhere else. After all, there is a theory that the cities of the industrial north of Italy are full of people whose bodies remember the south. My body, in this story, remembers nothing of Genoa. I was not there. When I finally moved to Italy myself, it was not to the coast but to Bologna.

Bologna is red and enclosed, a place where the sky appears in rationed rectangles between terracotta roofs and the long, brick ribs of the portici. I lived there for a year. I learned the rhythm of the bus that drove past my door on Via Barberia, the way its breaks screeched at the same zebra crossing every morning. I learned the smell of coffee under the portico, as shutters roll up and someone mops up yesterday’s dirt from the marble pavement. In every corner the heat from the day sat like something waiting you out, so that walking home at midnight your ankles were still warmed from below. Still, when I walked along Via dell’Indipendenza to catch a regional train, some part of me behaved as though I were approaching a shoreline. You see, I used to live near the sea.

I have a recurring dream. In it, I am on a train, and the train is going in two directions simultaneously. This is not distressing, in fact in the dream it seems reasonable. I am sitting very still and the landscape outside the window is moving in both directions at once, receding and approaching, the same field appearing on both sides of the glass. The signs flicker between languages, and I am both very hot and very cold at the same time.

I wake up and the feeling persists for approximately thirty seconds. In those thirty seconds, my invented grandfather and the trains and Bologna all sit on top of one another like transparent slides, the colours bleeding together before they pull apart. For a moment I am not sure which language my mouth should be ready for, which currency is in my wallet, which coastline could be out the window. I open my laptop and try to connect to the Wi-Fi, as if a working signal might pin me to one place more firmly.

My grandfather’s train went north. Away from Genoa, which did not best suit his character and would’ve deeply upset his mother. I like to think he did not board it because he was brave, or certain, but because staying still for too long did not appeal to him. He still had a habit of holding onto where he’s been: a folded picture of the sea tucked close to his body, pressed against receipts and a library card and the faces of his children, which taught those who came after him (like me) what to do with the places you have inhabited and loved. To carry them until they become interior. Until the sea or a city or a landscape is not a place you are from but a room you live in, permanently, the walls of which you happen to be standing.

I am on the train again, a real one this time. The woman across from me is still asleep, her boarding pass in her novel, going somewhere. The train is still very fast and quiet and the light through the window is the flat Scottish light of spring, which is not the light of Liguria, nor Emilia, but another home of mine. I have finally connected to the Wi‑Fi, and an album of photographs from Italy opens. The lit up streets of Rome I’ve ran down at night; the Palermo backstreets where I’ve giggled until my stomach hurts; the tabaccheria in Bologna where the owner would reach behind him the moment he saw me in the doorway; a Milanese afternoon where I once walked through the fashion capital as an awkward pre-teen in the wrong shoes and the wrong jacket; the waves I jumped over in the Rimini sun; a café high up in the Italian Alps where I made snow angels and couldn’t feel my toes; the tiled floor of my flat where Genovese pesto was eaten twice a day…

* Here the Lady doth set down her quill and regard the manuscript with a furrowed brow. It hath come to her attention that certain words contained within this chronicle were not, strictly speaking, available at the time of its composition. She is aware of this. The Lady hath considered their removal and found the alternatives wanting, and she asketh only that the reader extend to her the same mercy they would extend to any woman doing her best under difficult circumstances, which these, as the evidence do jointly attest, were.

~ ~ ~

PART THE FIRST: OF THE PHYSICK & ITS ADMINISTRATION

In the year of her sixteenth summer, the Lady was prescribed the Physick. Of the reasons thereunto pertaining, she shall not speak. Her parents yet live, and before them she maintains the position – held firm as any fortified tower – that she emerged fully formed from a chrysalis, having never possessed occasion to require such remedies. What she will chronicle is this: the Physick was dispensed with cheerfulness, with haste, and with the untroubled confidence of a medical establishment that hath been conducting this particular business since the nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-first year of Our Lord, and hath no particular quarrel with it.

For the first weeks of her administration thereof, the Lady was, by all credible accounts, a grumpy wretch. She was sixteen varieties of wretched and cast blame upon all things save the glaring Hot Pink Vial of synthetic hormones she consumed each morning with her water. Blame fell upon her schooling, upon her examinations, upon the weather, upon the boys, upon the evening’s supper (for which the Lady doth here beg her mother’s continued pardon), and upon sundry other trifles of no consequence.

She did not, the Lady wisheth to note, blame the Physick. This was not because she was stupid. This was because she was sixteen, and being sixteen is a condition that produces, among other things, an absolute certainty that one’s suffering is unique, legitimate, and caused by everything in the external world rather than anything in the internal one. The Lady remembers being sixteen with the particular tenderness one reserves for a person who was doing their best and had no idea what was happening.

And then – as plagues and marriages and all manner of inconvenient things do – these feelings dissolved somewhat. The Lady formed the grievous misapprehension that she had grown older, cooler*, and past all difficulty. She filed the matter in the great archive of Things Best Not Examined and proceeded thence to concerns of greater apparent import, by which means, she got on with it.

Let it be recorded for posterity: they had not dissolved. She had merely forgotten, which is a different matter entirely, and one the Lady doth now recognise as the Physick’s most accomplished trick.

PART THE SECOND: WHEREIN THE LADY IS FINE, & POSTAL ROUTES ARE MUCH ABUSED

The thing about the Physick is that it doth not announce itself. There is no dramatic affliction, no fit of the vapours, no occasion upon which the Lady might reasonably have declared herself unwell and taken herself to bed. She was not afflicted with melancholy. She was not afflicted with wrongness. She was afflicted with fineness. A mild and horizontal fineness, spread evenly across her days like a thin gruel that doth technically constitute a meal. Everything was fine, she was fine. And therein lay the difficulty, for fine is a very hard thing to argue with, and a very easy thing to simply continue being.

The Lady wisheth the reader to understand what fine looked like in practice, as she findeth the word insufficient to the task. Fine looked like this: she would think of a thing she wished to do, and would then think about thinking about doing it, and would then make a cup of tea, and then it would be evening. Fine looked like ordering a book and leaving it in its parcel for three weeks because opening it required a decision about where to put it, and decisions about where to put things required a kind of energy that was simply not available. Fine looked like being, by most external measures, a perfectly functional young woman, and by no internal measure whatsoever actually present at them. Fine was, it doth now appear, not fine. But it was very convincingly fine, and the Lady had been performing it for so long that she had, at some point, forgotten it was not.

Meanwhile, the chronicle continued. The Lady removed herself to the city of Glasgow for the purposes of University. Glasgow, a city of great repute and questionable mercy toward its newcomers, did operate upon a model of medical provision that the Lady can only describe as providence (or at least thus it appeared to one small country-bumpkin Lady arriving within its gates) by which she meaneth: thou art on thy own, good luck, God wileth it. She required a physician. She did not acquire a physician. She meant to acquire a physician on several separate occasions spanning multiple years, and each time a matter of greater urgency presented itself, by which the Lady meaneth: nothing presented itself. She simply could not do it.

She instead did what any subject in a not-a-crisis-at-all crisis doth do, and dispatched a messenger to her mother.

Her mother (a saint; may her name be remembered in the annals and her seat in heaven be both comfortable and well-positioned) did collect the prescriptions from the physician of the Lady’s hometown and forwarded them to Glasgow by royal post. Every several months, like the turning of the seasons, like the reliable rising of the sun, like any of the things on can count upon absolutely and thus takes for granted, three months’ worth of Hot Pink Hormones would arrive, dispatched with love across the realm.

When the Lady then removed herself to the Italian territories, the operation did escalate to that of a minor diplomatic mission. There were several expeditions wherein members of the family’s retinue did traverse the continent by air, conveying amongst their hand luggage – alongside their shirts and their sweetmeats and their sundry personal effects – the Lady’s contraceptive supply. They moved as small and loving smugglers, united in their refusal to engage with the Italian system of medicine, which the Lady hath heard is perfectly adequate but which none of them were prepared to find out.

PART THE THIRD: OF THE COUNSEL THE LADY DID RECEIVE & REJECT

Throughout all of this, courtiers did occasionally speak unto the Lady. They spoke with good intention, as courtiers do when they wish to be of service. They spake thus: thou knowest, the Physick can affect most grievously thy hormones. They spake: I did depart from mine own Physick and felt an entirely different creature. One particularly well-meaning medical courtier did present the Lady with a pamphlet* on the subject, which the Lady received with a smile and filed in the previously mentioned great archive of Things Best Not Examined, alongside the matter of the Physick itself and a letter from her bank that she hath been meaning to open since the previous November. The Lady’s archive is, at this point, quite full.

They further spake (and here they would lower their voices, in the manner of one delivering news the listener hath clearly not the constitution to receive): hast thou considered that it might be

affecting thee?

The Lady heard these counsels. She considered them briefly, as one considers a stone in the road before stepping around it, and she did step around them with enormous confidence. She was not affected. She was simply a weary soul – one who required a considerable distance of road before executing rather modest decisions, in whom the passage between the wanting and the doing was wide and largely impassable, as though the two were separated by a river with no bridge and an indolent ferryman having his lunch. This was her character. She had possessed this character for years. She had, in point of fact, possessed it since approximately her sixteenth year, which she did not find suspicious, for one does not find suspicious that which one has never known otherwise.

As if she should be so easily altered by something as trivial as her own natural hormones. Her real ones, no less.

Thy spells shall not prevail upon me, natural hormones. I am quite contented in my low-wattage* existence.

In the midst of this quarrel, she was, crucially, still not in possession of a physician.

PART THE FOURTH: THE VIAL RUNNETH OUT

Two months past, the supply was exhausted. The Hot Pink Vial stood empty upon the shelf, as a throne from which the sovereign hath lately fled, and the Lady regarded it with the expression of one who hath known this day would come and hath done absolutely nothing to prevent it.

Let it be recorded, for the sake of honest chronicle, that there was no great period of deliberation that did precede this. The Lady doth not arrive at circumstances so much as discover herself already within them, having travelled there by a route she cannot fully account for, through a sequence of events that were, as even the Lady’s most loyal counsel would be forced to concede, her fault – and Glasgow’s. Glasgow, for reasons of its own sovereign choosing, continued in its long-established custom of not furnishing the lady with a physician, and so she did think: thou knowest what, I shall not be troubled with this. And thus it was. The Lady resteth easy in her conscience, which is the main thing.

Now. For those who desire the dry account – the physician’s account, the account one might read in a learned treatise whilst sitting in a very uncomfortable chair with insufficient natural light, eating a biscuit one did not particularly want – here is what the Physick doth: it introduceth into the body quantities of artificial oestrogen and progestogen sufficient to persuade the pituitary gland, that small and credulous governor of the body’s interior kingdom, that the Lady is already with child (heaven forfend!). The pituitary gland, being easily deceived and apparently not very bright, doth believe this entirely, and doth on that basis suppress all further ovulation. The natural cycle – the one that produceth the Lady’s own true hormones, the ones her body hath been labouring to produce since the onset of her womanhood, the ones that are, when one thinks about it, rather hers – goeth quiet.

She doth not notice its silence, for she is sixteen and possesseth no point of comparison. The silence is simply the baseline. The baseline is simply the self. And so it goeth, for a number of years that the Lady hath counted and found to be more than she is entirely comfortable with, but which she is choosing to regard as formative rather than lost, on the grounds that this is the more useful framing and she is trying to be sensible about it.

And then one day the Physick ceaseth, and the Lady is presented to herself, and hath absolutely no idea what to do with her, for she hath never been introduced.

PART THE FIFTH: THE EMERGENCE OF THE LADY’S INTERESTS & OTHER ALARMING DEVELOPMENTS

The Lady wisheth to set down what followed without becoming insufferable. There is a version of this chronicle wherein she employeth the word ‘awakening’ without the protective armour of quotation marks, and the reader doth close the manuscript, and cast it into the fire, and call for wine, and summon a priest, and they would be right to do so. She is endeavouring not to write that chronicle. What she is instead writing is that in the ceasing of the Hot Pink Vial – as when a siege is lifted and the gates of a city do creak slowly open and the inhabitants emerge blinking into the light unsure of whether to weep or not – the Lady appears to have developed interests.

For instance: this very document. The Lady hath established a Substack*. Let the heralds be summoned! Let this be read aloud at the next available assembly, and thereafter embroidered upon something! She hath never in her life undertaken anything so exhilaratingly extracurricular*. She is one who hath historically found the concept of a Project to be vaguely exhausting – the domain of other, more ambitious, domain-named persons. And yet here she standeth, with a Substack*, which she did establish and name and fill with words, entirely of her own volition, without mandate, without anyone asking her to do it even once, which she findeth most extraordinary, though others may not, but that is their matter and not hers.

She hath begun attending a café* each morning. She hath a specific café*, which she located on her third day of the new regime by the method of walking until she found somewhere that did not make her immediately wish to leave. Within that café*, she hath a specific chair, which she hath assessed, occupied, and claimed by right of consistent presence, in the manner of a small and low-stakes act of territorial expansion – this café* being located a mere twenty seconds’ march from her front gate, which the Lady acknowledgeth somewhat undermined the territorial drama. Within her café* there resides a gentleman who doth always precede her in arrival and doth play games upon the establishment’s computing* devices, and she findeth his presence deeply comforting, like a lighthouse, like a sentinel who hath never acknowledged her existence and is therefore perfect.

In a related development, the Lady hath granted herself dispensation to cease attending the library. This was not a decision made lightly. The Lady hath a deep and genuine respect for libraries as institutions, for the idea of libraries, for the democratic and civilising function of the library in the life of a society. She doth not have a deep and genuine respect for this particular library. It doth make her grumpy and hungry. It is grey and crowded and smelleth, the Lady shall be direct, of BO*. The café* doth not. It is yellow and quiet and smelleth of freshly baked pastries, and its privy is clean and consistently unoccupied. The computing* device is the same computing* device. The studying is the same studying. The Lady hath done the mathematics and, quite frankly, the library is hereby served notice of her departure. She wisheth it well.

She did purchase jeans*. The Lady appreciates this may sound as nothing, but it is, in truth, of the utmost significance and she will not have it minimised. She had, until this point, worn exclusively linens, for linens will fit any person who owneth a belt, and thus she was not required to enter a shop and be approached by a slimmer version of herself and declare that no, she required no assistance, and begin to perspire, and depart with nothing. However, since the Hot Pink Vial ceased its governance of her person, she did find the jeans*, and command them by post, and receive them, and regard herself in the looking glass, and perceive therein Aphrodite, and the matter was closed. She is now the proud possessor of three pairs.

The Lady findeth this extraordinary. The Lady doth not require others to find it extraordinary. The Lady hath, as previously noted, a Substack*, and hath recorded it thereupon.

She did rearrange her chamber. She resolved the night before to dedicate the entire following day to this endeavour, and was excited about it in advance, which is itself an earth-shattering miracle sufficient to warrant its own entry in this chronicle. Excitement about a planned domestic activity, experienced in advance of the activity, had not previously been a feature of the Lady’s interior life. She moved her bed. She moved her writing desk from the window and replaced it with a speaking device* upon which a rubber duck doth sit (a jaunty note of colour). She did wander to the market-square and there, among the clamour of baristas* and the rattling of granny trolleys* upon the stones, did purchase many a fair vinyl disc of sundry musicks and diverse humours. These round relics she bore homeward like trophies and, returning to her chamber, did set about their placing with deliberate ceremony, each disc becoming a small but bright moon orbiting the quiet kingdom of her room. She stood back and surveyed the result and felt something she can only describe as a deep tenderness for this new chamber she had been withholding from herself for the past year, like a miser who hath sat upon a treasure chest so long he hath forgotten it openeth. And standing there, she did radiate the confidence of one who created light upon the first day.

PART THE SIXTH: A RECKONING

It is not that she hath become productive in some aspirational sense. She is not establishing a trading concern, nor learning the Portuguese tongue, nor training for any endeavour possessing a finish line, nor doing any of the various things that ambitious persons do when they with it to be known that they are ambitious persons. It is something, in the Lady’s estimation, more remarkable than that: it is that things occur to her now, and she goeth and doth them, and this seemeth entirely ordinary, and it is not.

It was not, before. Before, the Lady would have the reader understand that there was a fog between the thought and the deed, a thick yet transparent fog, one she could not perceive but could most certainly feel. The thought would arrive, and the Lady would receive it, and then she would stand at the edge of the doing of it, and the doing would recede, and she would conclude that this was simply her nature, and return to her bed, and the thought would sit in the corner of the room, quietly, for several weeks, until she either forgot it entirely or did it at eleven o’clock on a Sunday in a sudden burst of energy that she could not account for and certainly could not replicate.

It doth turn out it was her. That is to say: it was not her nature. It was the Physick, installed upon her nature like an uninvited houseguest who hath occupied the good chair for so long that the household hath begun to set a place for him at supper. He did not deserve the place at supper. He did not deserve the good chair.

For the Physick is a courteous oppressor. It doth not announce itself, nor arrive with banners and proclamations and the clatter of a siege. It settleth, quietly, upon the nervous system like a very polite, very insidious weight, and one doth adapt, as one adapteth to most things that do not immediately kill one. One doth cease to notice. One doth conclude that this is simply who one is. One who commandeth parcels and then doth not open them for a fortnight. One who forgetteth what day it is because nothing, according to her, hath occurred that week, though the week hath in fact been full of occurrences to which she was simply not paying her full attendance.

And then it ceaseth, and the weight lifteth, and one is left standing in a rearranged chamber, in new jeans*, with a Substack*, and a rubber duck* on a speaking device*, blinking.

It doth not feel like a return to some earlier, truer self from whom the Lady hath been long separated, some innocent maiden, pure of heart and unacquainted with examinations and possessed of a strange fondness for the rap music*. That creature is gone and the Lady doth not mourn her, for she cannot recall her with sufficient accuracy to miss her properly. Instead, the Lady doth liken it to the lifting of a siege one had ceased to notice was ongoing. Like a candle that hath burned dim for so long that one adjusted to the dimness and forgot that dimness was not the natural state of candles – and then someone lit another, and one sitteth there, slightly overwhelmed, thinking:

Good lord. Hath the realm always been this vivid, and did no one think to mention it?

One cannot mourn an appetite so consistently managed that one hath ceased to expect it. One cannot grieve a self one hath never been introduced to, any more than one might mourn a banquet one did not know was being held, in a hall one did not know existed, to which one was not invited, because one was sitting in an adjacent room assuming that adjacent rooms were all there was, and that the sound coming through the wall was simply how walls sounded, and that the smell of cooking was simply how the air smelled, and that this was fine, one was perfectly content in one’s adjacent room. One doth simply conclude, after sufficient years, that this is what it is to be a lady of mature station going about her affairs.

And she cannot be wrathful about it. This is, the Lady confesseth, its own particular vexation – for she would very much like to be wrathful, as wrath is a cleaner and more satisfying emotion than the one she is left with, which hath no proper name. She cannot be wrathful at a choice she made, and would in different circumstances likely make again. She cannot be wrathful at the years, for they were still her years and she was still within them, more or less, doing her best with the candle she had been given. She noticed, in the end, the way one doth notice when a sound one hath long ceased to hear hath finally and completely stopped. Not the sound itself. The absence of it.

EPILOGUE: THUS ENDETH THE CHRONICLE

The Lady feeleth interested in things. Not in the abstract and aspirational sense, but in specific things, particular things. She feeleth the want before the obstacle. She walketh through the city and noticeth it. The light on the buildings in the morning, the way the queue in the café* moves, the expression on the face of the gentleman at the computing* device when he wins (which hath happened twice in the Lady’s presence and which she hath found, both times, disproportionately pleasing).

She hath a Substack*. She doth her morning stretches*. She hath begun, on occasion, to read ahead. She hath three new pairs of jeans*, hanging in a tidy wardrobe in a chamber she did arrange herself, on a day she had been looking forward to, which she intendeth to continue finding remarkable for as long as it pleaseth her to do so.

She is not taking questions –

(She is, however, taking breakfast. On purpose, every morning, because it turneth out she enjoyeth it. Let it be known that the Lady hath, at long last, come into her appetite. And if the court hath opinions on the matter, the Lady directeth them to the kitchen, where they may take cake, and eat it, and reflect upon their priorities.)

– But she is, it doth turn out, available.

~ ~ ~

Appendix: A Non-Exhaustive Register of New Simple Pleasures Taken Up by the Lady, Presented Herewith for the Record

• Hillwalking in the realm’s finer territories

• The compilation of a Bucket List* (a document of aspirations; not an actual bucket)

• Great and sudden excitement regarding recipes

• The procurement of three turtlenecks*

• The establishment of a Substack* (see main chronicle, passim)

• The rearrangement of her musicks and the first activation of her speaking device* in several years

• A marked increase in the dispatching of correspondence; or is it the receiving thereof?

• The cooking of meals requiring more than one vessel

• Research into available positions of gainful employment

• The initiation of a stretching regimen each morning

• The consumption of new entertainments rather than the repeated consumption of old ones

• The drafting of a list of lists

• The acquisition of a granny trolley*

• The lighting of incense*, or the awakening to the existence of smells

• The purposeful eating of the morning meal

• Attendance at University lectures in which she is one of only two persons present

~ ~ ~

Either way, he said something about Pirandello and then something about Tarantino and you couldn’t say with confidence how one led to the other, only that they had, audibly, in the same sentence, in a kitchen, after a party, at some o’clock.

The fridge hummed. It has been humming since before you arrived, and it will hum after, and in between it hums, and that is the fridge’s whole thing.

He was holding a passion fruit yoghurt, which he had probably found in the fridge, and was now eating it very slowly, gesturing with the spoon in-between mouthfuls, and saying:

The teaspoon is the object most at home in the kitchen. It disappears into use, never a thing the way a broken chair is suddenly, terribly, a thing. Which is why, he said, when you find a teaspoon in an unexpected drawer, the shock is existential. You may become rather excited, nervous. You have met the teaspoon for the first time.

Is that right? you thought, trying to keep your eyes level.

“Right”.

He set his yoghurt down, nowhere near done. The fridge, he was saying, doesn’t stop entropy, per se. Nothing stops entropy, that’s not on offer, but it may slow it to a degree, and in doing so it makes a claim that no other domestic object makes, which is that the contents inside it are worth the energy required to keep them as they are. The fridge becomes a commitment device, a pinky promise.

Someone must’ve given him that idea. His mother, maybe, who would’ve once stood in a similar kitchen at a fridge not unlike this one and said if you open it, you eat it, Danielichieo.

You looked at the fridge, which had four magnets: Amsterdam’s skyline, a lemon, a cow in a knitted jumper, and the number for an emergency plumber. You looked at this number for quite a long time. You didn't need it, but it was easier to look at than the fridge, which had all of a sudden become a lot.

The cow’s jumper was small and red. Round neck. No buttons. The kind of jumper that is knitted by someone who loves you and has slightly misjudged your size. And there was a whole life in that, wasn’t there, you thought — not the cow, the jumper, the fact of it — because someone had decided that a cow needed a jumper, which means someone had looked at a cow and thought it looked cold. Someone had extended toward a cow the same domestic instinct they extended toward the people they fed and worried about and checked on. Had taken up their needles and worked at it, not quickly, you can’t do a jumper quickly, even a small one, and done the neck shaping and shoulder seam and maybe got the tension wrong once and had to undo it and start again, and when they finished they had a small jumper for a cow. Then that jumper went on a magnet. Then the magnet went on a fridge in, presumably, a city, next to an emergency plumber’s number, and it occurred to you, you thought, standing here at this hour, that the jumper was perhaps the most tender thing in the room, possibly in the building, possibly going quite far out from there in most directions.

Was the cow warm, where it was from? It was hard to know. It was a magnet. It had never been anywhere cold. And yet the jumper. It had been given something it did not need, out of love, by someone who imagined it might.

There is something in that, you thought. Though that’s the sort of thing he would say. Nevermind. You had been in this kitchen a while.

Daniel (for arguments sake) was still talking, about whether a kitchen is a room. In what sense, he was asking, is the kitchen experienced as a room and not as a function? Because a corridor isn’t a room. A corridor is a becoming, providing simple direction. But a kitchen is where the private and the appetitive meet. It’s the room that knows things about you. It catches you at your most vulnerable. Snacking, wet hair, maybe sneaking a cigarette with the fan on. This is how you first presumed that you were, in fact, in a kitchen.

“Yes, exactly,” he said, and looked at you with an expression signalling oh, you’re here — though you could’ve sworn you didn’t say anything.

He finished the yoghurt. Put the spoon in the pot.

“Kafka” Then a sentence. Then: “which is also, actually, what the gate is actually doing in that passage, if you—”

You took a sip of water. You had stopped following the argument and started following his hands, which moved in a way that seemed connected to what he was saying but also had a big ink stain on them which was annoying you. He was clumsy and probably didn’t shower before the party.

The oven clock blinked 00:00.

It had been saying 00:00 since you’d been in here. Either it was midnight, repeatedly, or someone had unplugged something years ago and it had just been wrong ever since.

You wondered whether this kitchen talk was in your head or wine was in your bloodstream, whether Daniel was a prophet or an echo, or a man who does this specifically in kitchens, after parties, to anyone who has the misfortune of entering. You thought about the emergency plumber’s number. You thought about the teaspoon heaping and heaping.

And Daniel is still speaking. But it’s softer now. Or perhaps you have curved, finally, into your own question mark, on the floor.

The Ministry of Horizontal Affairs (whose existence few had previously felt the need to confirm) had issued a notice on thin paper, faintly inked, smelling of dust and citrus, declaring that all citizens were henceforth required to maintain a measurable degree of direction. The document did not specify of what kind.

Anselmo received the notice folded into a municipal newsletter between a coupon for cucumbers and an advertisement for orthopedic shoes. He read it twice.

At seventy-three, he had outlived three currencies, five prime ministers, two collapses of government, and the invention of passwords requiring symbols. He had no intention of following more orders. Anselmo knew he had not yet chosen a direction. He had, in fact, chosen not to choose, which he considered a fine position. In youth, one leans too quickly. Toward love. Causes. Noise. He preferred to remain plumb.

His walls were grey — a flat fossil shade selected years ago by his former lover who had called it “modern restraint”. He had neither objected nor agreed, although at this moment they seem rather ugly.

On his grey counter preceding his grey walls sat a loaf of pre-sliced bread, which Anselmo had not asked for, yet this was the only form available at the supermarket. It struck him as faintly violent. Deciding his portions for him? If he could he would’ve cut the loaf thicker like his mother used to.

He did not dwell on this, however, as that would require too much energy. Instead, he went to the back garden to collect some mint leaves from the council-installed planter that had arrived the previous month. Anselmo picked the first leaves he saw and brewed a pot of tea.

When he returned to the counter, the bread had shifted. The slices had begun to lean infinitesimally away from their neighbour.

Don’t be ridiculous, he thought, suspecting vertigo. But the vertigo, if present, belonged not to his body but to his kitchen.

Upon lifting his cup of tea, he noticed the liquid inside leaning distinctly to the left.

He adjusted the saucer, to which the tea adjusted back.

The loaf leaned right.

Anselmo stood very still, as one does before admitting either to madness or a very serious theological problem.

To confirm the matter (because he was not unreasonable), Anselmo placed a marble at the centre of the dining table. The table was laminate, purchased pre-assembled from a catalogue many years ago. The marble rolled west, paused, reconsidered, then rolled east.

Anselmo looked back at the bread. He imagined, briefly, that somewhere someone was irritated about serrated knives. That division, once introduced, cannot be undone.

He shook this off. One must not invent cosmologies over their lunch.

Further into the day, however, he began to take more notice. He noticed newspaper headlines leaning. One page displayed catastrophe, the other, outrage about a catastrophe. Below, a curated indignation package invited him to “engage meaningfully”.

Anselmo did not engage. He chuckled, licked the tip of his finger and moved on. He had once leaned (in his thirties) toward something that cost him friendships and a modest inheritance. He had learned, thereafter, the elegance of withholding.

Anselmo ventured outside. At his local café – which now advertised ethically ambiguous beans – people were leaning in coordinated ways. One leaned towards her girlfriend, who was wearing a very soft cardigan. Another leaned towards a double espresso, though his friend insisted a single would do. Outside, the pavement inclined politely toward the bakery; the bakery inclined toward the pharmacy; and, had the angle continued, one may have found themselves led to the narrow second-hand bookshop with the crooked blue awning, where Anselmo sometimes stood too long pretending to search for something so particular that it could not reasonably be found.

Everyone walked as usual, yet no one was quite vertical. Each body held a private bias which was not there yesterday. A man angled himself tenderly toward his florist, who was wearing a new perfume. A woman’s steps slanted almost imperceptibly toward a clothing boutique advertising 60% off (the business is moving elsewhere). A teenager leaned toward his reflection in a shop window, debating whether he should’ve changed his jacket for the weather. It seemed that preference had grown physical. Something, however small, had exceeded its opposite.

How silly, Anselmo thought, attempting to remain neutral. He planted his feet symmetrically and imagined a line descending from his skull into the earth. I have no inclination, he whispered. The words slid sideways.

That evening, a second notice arrived.

Citizens exhibiting insufficient direction may experience temporary dissolution or fragmentation of perspective.

Am I going crazy? Anselmo returned to his counter and stared again at the bread. He suddenly felt exposed, like this little loaf had been laughing at him. Why does everyone else seem claimed? he wondered. When had the world started deciding? He had abstained carefully all his life. Perhaps he had mistaken abstention for balance. He had believed neutrality was a height one could occupy without consequence, like a shelf above dust.

Anselmo imagined himself dissolving at the edges and felt, at that moment, an unfamiliar nostalgia for flatness. Flatness, he believed, would cure this episode.

He sought out an old building rumoured to contain unrenovated floors. The caretaker, who possessed formidable eyebrows, permitted him entry on the condition that he not measure anything officially. Inside, the floors were uneven in a traditional way: historic warping and honest sagging. Anselmo stood in the center of the room and waited for some kind of clarity, the kind that arrives after sufficient effort or ascent.

Instead, he experienced something of a light headache.

His preferences thinned. He could no longer recall whether he preferred mint tea or black coffee, morning or evening, grey or beige. Every thought balanced perfectly against its opposite, and in that equilibrium, each dissolved. Even his mild skepticism toward bureaucracy dissolved into a milder skepticism toward skepticism.

Without leaning toward one thing over another, he felt transparent. He tried to recall which street he preferred walking home. He recalled the existence of streets, but not preferring one.

Anselmo had leaned toward comfort for years. Toward convenience. Toward the pleasant neutrality of not offending anyone who might someday be useful. Toward the equilibrium of ironic detachment. He had leaned away from discomfort so subtly that it resembled balance. Anselmo imagined himself gently rotated by unseen hands. He imagined discovering that his previous non-leaning had merely funded the angle of someone else.

Perhaps the Ministry had been imprecise:

Without direction, there was no preference.

Without direction, no narrative.

Without direction, no Anselmo.

He hurried outside, where the street began to lean again. Or perhaps it had not ceased leaning. One does not notice tilt when one is busy being transparent. The bakery’s windows had been cleaned, displaying pastries dusted thickly in sugar. The bookstore had rearranged its shelves, and, to Anselmo’s delight, had stocked the complete oeuvre of his favourite author.

Had it always?

Anselmo stood. He observed himself standing. Shoes flat. Spine attentive. Very vertical, thank you. But verticality, he was beginning to suspect, is an ambition rather than a fact. Anselmo thus allowed himself a minor but definite lean — toward curiosity, perhaps, or the smell of baked goods. It did not matter so long as one exceeded the other.

In doing this, he found himself walking towards the shiny bakery, which does not sell sliced bread.

I try, out of habit, to call it a bed. This is inaccurate, because it has a back, and also because I am no longer lying down, I am sitting up, something you do in chairs, not beds, and the more I sit here, the more chair it becomes. Eventually I am no longer in something ambiguous at all. I am just sitting, fully seated, in the chair.

Before my eyes have fully arrived, I am holding the little rectangle. I do not remember picking it up. That’s fine. It knows where to be.

It is warm. Like it has been doing this all night. Like it woke me up. Light enters my eyes from a place no larger than a slice of toast. Algorithmically golden. Buttery. Ahhhhh, the sunrise. I do not verify this with the window because the window is unreliable and has an attitude problem. The window would like me to feel something. I refuse.

I check everything. I check nothing. I absorb:

• ten tragedies

• three jokes

• one ad for something I will not buy

• one ad for something I will think about buying

• a couple announcing they are having their fifth son

Congrats! I feel appropriately blank.

It occurs to me then that I am awake. This awareness arrives rather fast, and I begin falling off my chair-bed: apparently it has been happening for a while and no one bothered to tell me.

Time to get up, I think.

No. Not like that.

Time to relocate.

I move to the eating chair (chairs have jurisdictions, didn’t you know?). This is where I get my nutrients. I look at the little rectangle while food happens in the background. I look at food I am not eating. Food other people are eating. Food I could have eaten, better food, but am not.

Eat the granola you bought.

The little rectangle was very persuasive about this granola. I trust it. I chew. I feel no resentment. Only a mild vertigo as the falling resumes.

I find my next chair. I do not know why this chair is different, only that it is. I sit in it carefully, as if it might remember me. When I sit, my body does not arrange itself the the way I would’ve liked. Something about the angle feels incorrect. I adjust. I adjust again. I stop adjusting. This seems right.

The rectangle in front of this chair is not the same rectangle as before. It is larger. Or chunkier. Or louder, despite making no sound. It does not glow in a friendly way. It is very bright and hurts my head. Ouch.

It wears fonts. It has opinions and speaks in smaller rectangles, which appear to be saying things. Things like Just circling back and Per my last message, and I am meant to understand what to do next, as if this does not accelerate my fall.

I sit very still for a very long time. I appear to be participating though my body begins to slump. My mind goes somewhere flat and wide and unhelpful. Thoughts attempt to land and slide right off. My eyes, meanwhile, are extremely awake. They remain fixed on this medium-sized rectangle, scanning carefully.

Eventually, I am released. Someone named Cynthia signs off with Best, and I feel like I’ve narrowly escaped.

I must reward myself.

Where is the comfy chair? There it is, it has been waiting for me.

This chair receives me like a net, it understands me, never asks questions. I collapse into it. The big rectangle lights up. The big rectangle is generous, it tells stories with faces large enough to resemble something real. It laughs. I laugh when it laughs.

Oh man. This is great.

This is living.

I lose track of how long this goes on. The big rectangle does something and I agree. Faces arrive already familiar. Is this new or is it working?

The rhythm breaks. Oh no. The big rectangle has suddenly stopped feeding me.

My legs feel weird. Blood remembers a route it hasn’t taken in hours. Something has gone wrong. Time has passed again. The falling becomes noticeable, sharp this time, vertical. I feel heavy.

I must change chairs.

Back to the bed-chair. Back to the little rectangle. The angle I have arranged myself at feels earned this time. How I have missed you, bed-chair-chair-bed. The lights are off now, which makes the rectangle glow harder. It’s happy to see me too.

I scroll.

The little rectangle embraces its little-ness, its intimacy. It speaks directly into my thumb. It knows where I am going even if I do not. This is comforting. I am being led gently into a fog by someone named Susan who insists the way I am feeling is “totally normal, actually”.

Somewhere in here I consider stopping. This passes.

I scroll myself unconscious. The last thing I see is a rectangle inside a rectangle inside a rectangle. Somewhere in there is a person.

Possibly me.

Possibly the idea of me.

Hard to say.

When I wake again, I am already seated.

And the bed-chair still has a back.

Which means, by any reasonable definition,

this is still a chair.

And I am still here.

I’ve started ordering Americanos and I don’t like what that suggests.

I want to be clear that this was not a decision. I didn’t stand in a queue and think: today I become an Americano person. I am not that decisive, nor that theatrical. This is an observation. The kind you make accidentally, like noticing you’ve started saying “no worries”, or that you stand with your feet crossed now, or that you know how long it takes to boil an egg without a timer (four minutes? five? six?). You don’t remember learning it. You just notice.

This feels slightly unsettling, as a decision would imply agency, and agency implies taste. This feels more like I’ve been gently moved into a different lane by some invisible conveyor belt while I was looking the other way.

The problem with an Americano is that it’s not a drink so much as an announcement. Or rather, it is the refusal to announce. It is coffee that has decided not to make a thing of itself. And suddenly you are holding it, and suddenly you are implicated.

⚠️ FYI: I would like to preface that I know how irrational this is. I know a drink is a drink and the barista does not care and nobody is, in any formal or actionable way, building a psychological profile of me based on my choice of hot beverage. I know this the way most strangers will never think about me at all. But I also know - deeply, mortifyingly - that we are all always reading. Even when we pretend we’re not. We read shoes and pauses and tone shifts and what someone orders when there were other options right there. We read because it’s automatic, because our brains are bored and social and hungry for pattern. We read what someone orders the way we read what someone laughs at, or doesn’t laugh at, or laughs at a second too late: it’s not evidence, exactly, but it feels like a clue. And once you notice that you’re doing it, you can’t stop. You can tell yourself it means nothing and still clock it, still store it away in the soft, unofficial part of your mind where impressions live. The part that insists it’s just noticing, not judging (though the difference is thinner than we like to admit).

Other coffees participate in social life. A latte is an activity. A cappuccino is a small soft optimism, the suggestion that you might still believe in mornings, or at least the idea of them. A matcha (yes, I know - not coffee) feels like a drink you share rather than consume. Even an espresso is dramatic in its tiny stubbornness. These drinks arrive with intention and the possibility of staying. They say: we might talk. Or: we could linger. Or: you might learn something about me, and I might enjoy that.

An Americano says none of this. Instead, it’s telling you you’re low maintenance now. Like you don’t need embellishment. Like you’re not here for the long coffee date and subsequent three-hour chat we implicitly planned - the one where we sit down “for a second” and then it’s dark outside and we’ve accidentally told the truth about something. The one where we linger and giggle and order something else to justify staying.

And this reading persists no matter who you imagine across the table.

With friends. With people you are trying not to reattach yourself to. With someone new, where ambiguity is still doing most of the work. Even alone - which is perhaps the most revealing version. Ordering an Americano for yourself feels like pre-emptively cutting off your own digressions. Like you’re telling yourself you’re not in the mood to linger with your own thoughts either.

The word that keeps circling this in my head is “fine”.

“Fine” is, to me, one of the most mind-numbing words we have in the English language. Its emotional austerity, the verbal equivalent of closing a door gently but firmly. Do you think anyone has ever been “fine” in a meaningful way? Do you think “fine” has ever preceded a good decision, or a brave one, or anything that didn’t end with a long shower and a lot of thinking?

And maybe that’s the real offence of the Americano: it doesn’t court intimacy or lean into you. It doesn’t say let’s make a little moment here.

Which is also its appeal, I suppose. There’s something clean about it. Something adult. A drink that refuses to participate in the theatre of being perceived. And maybe I like that. Maybe I don’t want to decide between oat and soy milk and then stand there pretending I don’t care which one they’ve chosen. There is something calming about a drink that doesn’t invite commentary, or closeness, or a reading. But then you notice yourself wanting that, and the wanting becomes the question. So what does it say about you if you start wanting that?

The Americano panic is not about coffee. It’s about messaging. It’s about the fear that your small choices are announcing your emotional status to the room like those little flags we put on emails.

When I order a latte, I feel like I’m saying: I’m warm. I’m here. I’m safe to talk to. I might even want to be here longer than necessary.

When I order an Americano, I’m saying: I’m efficient. I’m busy. I have boundaries. I have already mentally left. Let’s not do this again. I’m actually hating this and wish I was anywhere else right now.

There is also the faint humiliation of frugality. The thirty pence saved is somewhat symbolic as opposed to economic. It’s the kind of saving that doesn’t help you materially yet does make you feel briefly clever, like you’ve located a small inefficiency in the universe and exploited it. Which is rather humiliating to admit, because who is this for? Who am I trying to impress with this microscopic frugality, and why am I pleased?

My boyfriend drinks Americanos, which feels relevant but also dangerous territory. I don’t want to be the kind of person who absorbs someone else’s preferences through proximity like a damp jumper. You know the way you suddenly start saying a phrase they say, and then you hear it leave your own mouth and you feel a brief nausea? One day you are ordering what you like. The next day you are ordering what we like.

Luckily, I have not disappeared or dissolved into someone else, though there is something I admire in it. The confidence of sufficiency. No performance of desire. Just caffeine and acceptance. And suddenly it’s like - wow. A man and his Americano. Revolting, honestly. Men appear able to build entire, emotionally complete relationships with things like this. What a beautiful idea that you could enter a relationship with something so unromantic and feel complete. That you could want so little and still feel held. I need this thrill!!!

So naturally, I went looking for my own version of this sentiment: the familiar trope of a woman and her mug.

Currently I am speaking of big, deep, navy mugs. Responsible mugs, if you will. Mugs that look like they belong to someone who owns a good coat and a calendar and a sangria-stained Persian rug. They sit beside the sweet little yellow mugs I used to fawn over: handle-less, photogenic, designed for expressing something ineffable. Rest assured, I still love them, I’m not completely devoid of fun. However I used to imagine myself making lattes in these mugs, which I never did, because this would require both equipment and aspiration, and because I would immediately encounter the reality that I cannot make foam behave, and then I would feel briefly ashamed in my own kitchen.

The navy mug does not offer this opportunity. It does not care if I improve. It does not mind being forgotten in the cupboard. I don’t love it, and it doesn’t love me back.

This isn’t about becoming my boyfriend, or drifting toward some masculine ideal of restraint. It’s about boredom. Boredom with negotiation. With softening. With the quiet pressure to want the kind of drink that looks like a cloud and tastes like a hug. Sometimes I don’t want a hug. Sometimes I want to consume something without it meaning anything at all.

Women, historically, are not allowed this. We do not drink, smoke, rest, or cope without commentary. Our comforts must be justified, aestheticised, explained. We accessorise our coping mechanisms. We aestheticise our fatigue. We build small altars to comfort and then feel vaguely ashamed when they fail to transform us. Even now, I say this while browsing for a water bottle that will sit in my room and do nothing - except it must, at minimum, be beautiful. Am I a hypocrite? Maybe - but this is also proof of how difficult it is to opt out of a language we were taught fluently.

Which is why my Americanos go so well with a cigarette (guilty!). Together they make a pleasure that feels faintly cheeky, and therefore permitted. A small, socially unambitious pleasure - one that doesn’t ask to be admired or improved. An Americano is thin and crisp in a way that seems designed for this pairing. It does not rush you. It doesn’t need your attention. It’s certainly too ugly for a photograph, which helps, because you already need two hands, a lighter, and a tolerance for mild shame.

It can go cold (I have been proved wrong!) - mine has, in fact, done exactly that while I’m writing this - but when it does, it gives the impression that you meant it to. Like a sexy French woman drinking something medicinal and unpleasant on purpose. An Americano does not coat the mouth or linger sentimentally. I maintain that it is coffee for people who wish they were having tea but do not want to say it out loud (my flatmate does not agree with this; she is both an avid tea and milky coffee consumer). In any case, it is undeniably the least sensual coffee. This is not a pleasure that reads as self-care, or pretends to be restorative. It simply occupies my time. It lets me stand somewhere unproductive and look rubbish.

A latte would never tolerate this. It wants eye contact. It wants to be enjoyed before it collapses into sadness. A latte is relational, invested. An Americano is a habit. It’s something you can do while your mind is elsewhere.

I realise this has taken on an oddly protective, yearning tone. I don’t even love Americanos. I simply don’t mind them. Which is worse. Because love would at least be an explanation. Love would imply passion. Love would mean this change is real, and maybe therefore justified. But “I don’t mind” is hardly an explanation. “I don’t mind” is how you become a person with an ugly-coloured kitchen and no memory of how you let that happen.

Perhaps the Americano isn’t about coffee at all. Perhaps it is about wanting less effort from your pleasures - less tending, less narration, fewer things asking you to explain who you are through them. Perhaps it is about being tired of making small decisions that pretend to be expressions of selfhood.

Or perhaps I’m just lazy, and this is the least demanding form of caffeine available in my café.

Either way, I keep ordering them.

Fish one

There it is again – the apparition. A fleeting contour beyond the glass, neither fish nor bubble, and yet convinced of its own importance.

Fish two

If you spent half as much time swimming as you spend interpreting refractions, we might actually reach the other side of the bowl someday.

Fish one

It appears whenever I begin to contemplate something important. I am starting to suspect that is not coincidental.

Fish two

That explains its rarity.

The bowl trembles faintly. Something passes by. A bubble rises. A crumb falls.

Fish one

You know, I’ve never felt particularly substantial. Suspicious, yes. Especially when the Giant passes. Listen… the water quivers in a manner I find too intentional.

Fish two

Not everything that quivers is plotting against you. Sometimes water behaves like water.

Fish one

This morning, I conducted an empirical study. I ascended to the surface – methodologically, you understand – and, upon blinking (which I have recently started doing, I don’t know why), I observed the Giant observing us. He stared at us with all the enthusiasm of a stone contemplating moss. It was not we he saw, but the general idea of fish, our fishness, if you will.

Fish two

He didn’t care?

Fish one

Imagine the indignity! To be a category. If the Giant’s attention were to falter, do you think we would vanish? Simply cease to be?

Fish two

Nonsense. I’ve existed perfectly well through many of your naps. Existence must be made of sturdier stuff.

Fish one

Then what sustains it?

Fish two

Habitat. Water. Hunger. The usual pillars of metaphysics.

Fish one

But of what meaning?

Fish two

Meaning is merely a name we give to the discomfort of not knowing why we’re still here.

They swim in a small, thoughtful circle.

Fish one

Suppose we exist only because the Giant imagines us. Because a bowl without fish would trouble him. And suppose he imagines us not to torment us, but to soothe himself, or distract himself, or to avoid imagining something else far more frightening.

Fish two

If that’s the case, I’d prefer not to know. There’s no dignity in learning you’re an invention conjured to soften someone else’s despair.

Fish one

I suppose not. But if our existence hangs on such fragile threads, then how shall we live?

Fish two

The way all creatures live. By swimming until the water stops, by eating until the food stops, and by assuming we are real enough.

Fish one

That seems a small philosophy.

Fish two

Small creatures require small philosophies. Anything larger would burst the bowl.

Fish one

(After a pause.)

Still… if imagination grants being, why not claim some of our own? What if we imagine the Giant in return? It might balance things.

Fish two

A reciprocal ontological courtesy. Very civilised of you.

Fish one

Why not? Let us think him into being. Give him shape. Substance. Burden.

Fish two

Excellent. I shall imagine him as punctual, attentive, and slightly restless. Attributes you clearly lack.

They tighten their circle, concentrating.

The water shivers. A shadow leans closer.

Fish one

You’ve overdone it. He’s coming.

Fish two

Already? But I haven’t finalised my hypothesis.

Fish one

We must act now. Perform convincingly. Demonstrate empirical coherence. Otherwise–

Fish two

Otherwise the Giant will think us out of being.

They swim – erratically, ceremonially, deliberately.

The Giant watches, puzzled, unsure why he bought these fish in the first place.