Originally written April 2023 :

‘A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave’.

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

'Do you think you'll go to America, like actually go?'

'Shh we're not talking about it, it's not real until I sign my contract...what the fuck have I done? I look like I’ve painted my foot with tippex!’

‘Oh Lu, that’s bad. Shall I do it?’.

It was the Friday night before my best mates birthday, I was sat topless on her bed in about three layers of Bondi sands ‘ultra dark’ with a turbie towel on my head, whilst feebly trying to paint my toe nails. We were prepping for her party and surprise ‘surprise birthday brunch’ I had smugly organized for us and eight of our girlfriends the next morning. I have been offered a transfer to New York and it's only been topic of conversation when we can cushion it with other fluffy mundane things so we don't have to face the reality I'd have to leave behind my best mate and entire life. After making a pigs ear of what is a pretty simple task I abandoned the topic and defeatedly lay back with my head at the end of her bed with my feet elevated on a pillow, whilst L took a Q-tip & tried to and clean up the edges whilst I nearly dozed off to Mariah’s ‘Fantasy’ bumping in the background; the most 2000s girls sleepover cliché you've ever seen. We’d spent the early evening in and ordered a chippy from our local, and eaten it on the floor whilst watching 2008 re-runs of Doctor Who with our new temporary housemate; we have a new guest at the LRC this week. The LRC, to those who know: the Lesbian Refuge Centre. We seem to be some of the only people in our 20s who are blessed with enough space to have a spare room in Central London and slowly it’s become a haven for all our queer friends who have had breakups, whether they dumped or were dumped. My very good friend E was our latest tenant, she’d broken up with her partner very suddenly and was temporarily homeless so was of course gifted keys to the LRC.

‘GUYS’. She literally fell into L’s room, waking me out of my headlining pop star dream. ‘GUESS WHO SCREEN SHOTTED MY BEREAL?’.

‘WHO??’

‘HER MOM!’

We all FELL about laughing in shock, disbelief and in the weird and funny, non-sensical joy of just being together.

The last 6-8 weeks have been nothing short of awful, but with an extra house mate injecting an elevated dose of fun into my day to day, life is finally getting better again. Work stress has been beyond comprehension - the type of overwhelment where you almost can feel the denseness of white noise inside your skull, whilst having enough cortisol in your bloodstream to give your morning alarm clock a run for its money. I don’t know why I dipped, there was never a ‘big factor’ but the new and constant anxiety was really starting to grate on me. It was a slow drip and I was reluctant to admit this time round I really could be depressed. The late afternoon light that filled my living room each evening began to always look like a Sunday night, even on the sunniest of days, and London felt smaller and smaller by the week. It’s a horrible feeling most of us have experienced and one I was so in denial to feel. I’d been doing so well recently and was trying my best not to sail down to the lows again. Thankfully as I said before, it’s looking up once more in the weird unceremonious way it does sometimes. One day you wake up and you genuinely feel better, and as you wait with baited breath it seems to thankfully continue. Although something is askew with me, just ever so slightly off kilter. Like a rock stuck in the under sole of my shoe or the drip of a tap you can only hear between breaths. Something so subtle, but nevertheless still there. I have a career beyond my years and a beautiful house, a gorgeous group of friends who paint my nails and shout about BeReals, and family who are all still with me, I should be very happy. However after a lot of therapy, another failed relationship and one really sad evening, I think I’ve realized what’s wrong.

‘Chris! Good to see ya mate, can we jump in it’s my house mates birthday... yeah yeah, gor’n you know Luce’ I purred to the bouncer with a slight East London twang (I turn into my Grandmother when I’m pissed). We’d rocked up to Freedom in Soho after our house party and I'd sauntered right past the queue after drunkenly wooing my favourite doorman. I danced downstairs to see the lavatory assistant who is practically my Auntie at this point, who greeted me with mutual excitement before dousing myself in paralyzing amounts of cheap fragrance, nicking a lolly pop and sitting on her lap whilst I updated her on all my drama. After snogging one of my best mates in the toilet for the second time that evening I went to the bar to get a drink that I didn’t pay for, before I hit the floor. It was one of those lovely occasions where for once everyone turns up and each way you glance there’s someone you know. We were all there. My school friends, our mutual friends, her university friends, their school cohort, the lot. I was having a bloody brilliant evening. I felt beautiful, had waltzed past the queue into my favourite club with all my friends, not dropped a penny on a drink and was riding this wave of invisibility until, I hit a glass ceiling. A pattern that seems to be recurrent whether I'm out with new or old friends, a small group or the biggest party of the year, there's a moment I plateau. Like the lights turn on inside my brain cueing everyone to simultaneously groan at the universal signal to pack up and head home for the night. I suddenly at the drop of a hat, feel very alone in a room full of crowded people. I'm always lost in the music until I'm not.

Defeated by the dip in dopamine I headed out to the street that illuminated red and yellow by the big neon casino light opposite the club, A was arm in arm with someone headed home for a shag, L smoking and laughing with her school friends over the road, people were sharing fags and spilling drinks, kissing one another and crying with laugher… and then there was me. I felt alone but a wave of unfamiliar contentedness just washed over me, so I took off. It was 2am & I was directionless but I just walked knowing I’d get to a tube station somewhere. People were running past me in the opposite direction with a trail of adrenaline left glowing behind them, love and laughter illuminating either side of the street and I just walked down the middle. I’d never felt like this, a moment in the metaphorical movie we all have playing in our minds where I finally give up and wipe all the makeup off my face, take my hair down and throw off my heels before walking bare foot all the way home.

As a lot of you know I had a very difficult relationship with a woman for the past eighteen months. I really hate talking about it for a multitude of reasons, one because I’m sick to the back teeth of it and I don’t want it to define me but also she’s not mine to talk about. She wasn’t mine, never was and never promised to be, and the way I thought and acted like she was, and the way she gave herself to me so she could be mine in fragments when she was in fact with someone else is disgraceful, actually. And I’m the first to admit that. I have a whole world of words on this to come in future but nevertheless for right now, as hard as I try to convince myself it hasn’t affected me and try to self soothe with the idea I’m not a completely shit person, it happened. The feelings of intense remorse and guilt mixed with such deep rooted love have manifested in a way I'm struggling to reason with. I walked in a big circle for what seemed like hours before I looped back around and reached Piccadilly Circus and stood right in the centre staring up at the screens. Groups of people swirling around me, everyone had someone else yet I felt so completely at home all on my own. There was this sense of freedom that had been released in me, I wanted to run as fast as I could, to spin through all the tube stations and sprint until I could physically fly. To scream into the wind and dance alone under the lights of Piccadilly. She made me feel something I’ve never felt before, but that feeling doesn’t exist anymore, it’s just an empty space. A fossil. The imprint is there, the impenetrable space is there but there’s nothing, there. I’m searching for a feeling that doesn’t exist, a person I don’t even want and a memory that was never real. I don’t feel same, I don’t live the same since I met and lost her not because I miss her or she changed me, because I felt something so intensely wonderful, so deeply true that I allowed myself to bleed into it and now every part of life on my own feels bleak. This fossil of us has laid the foundations of my adult life in London. My favourite bars are the first bars I visited when I moved into central London, the one's she introduced me to. My friends, I met when I was heartbroken and forced myself to leave the house, my favourite festival was the one I met her at, my love for writing born out of not having space to express my emotions, the list is endless. This subconscious programming of my life, the code that makes up my day to night is a product of my relationship with her. People, places, memories, loves, hates. It's wrong. It's depressing and unescapable, my life and routine has become a by-product of the world we shared and until I slot her back into my life or find a 'her' shaped replacement for that space, every aspect of me will feel like something is missing.

'The imprint is there, the impenetrable space is there but there’s nothing, there. I’m searching for a feeling that doesn’t exist, a person I don’t even want and a memory that was never real.'

The city has become my playground, I waltz into bars and don’t have to buy a single drink, I fly through the doors at work where I know everyone from the janitor to the baristas by name before going to pretentious PR events at rooftop bars. I snog my best friends and have good sex, lose myself in music and go on brilliant dates, take pictures, have expensive wine, laugh my heart out and yet still every time in every crowd, I look for her. No matter how happy or content I am, surrounded by one or one hundred people there’s always a fragment of time, a fleeting moment my eyes look to meet hers. To find her and ride that wave of invisibility with her, to dance with her above everyone else and to feel weightless in our connection, but instead I hit altitude on my own and end up falling from grace. I can’t live like this. I sometimes think it's my punishment. I don’t deserve to miss her, I don't want to miss her. I miss a feeling that never manifested into anything real. It’s an empty space with nothing in it yet my world has hardened around it, so there’s a permanent bump that I will continue to trip up on.

It's The book disrupting the brick wall by Jorge Méndez Blake expect the other way around. One fossil in the foundations of my being has created an arch that ruptures all the way to the top of who I am. A rock hard pocket of space in my life that nothing except the physical imprint of what was originally there can fill - something that never really existed.

I was stood on the platform at Piccadilly headed westbound, my eyes locked in a soft gaze as I felt the breeze from the trains whistle through the tunnels and lace itself through my hair. These realisations had flooded me and I was allowing myself to be swept away with the current. For once I wasn't feeling alone in my loneliness, but instead accepted that's the only time I feel truly happy because being alone is the closest I feel to feeling like myself aside from being with her. For the first time in a long time I let my mind take me where it wanted to take me, let the water break through all the walls and wash me into a world I've long buried the key to.

She was next to me on the platform. We have nothing to say, I don’t want to talk to her or acknowledge anything that’s happened, we can't. It's too heavy. We're held together by fragments of a broken love, the acceptance of the past would be enough to shatter us. I don’t want us to touch, just to hear her breathe and know in the silence she won’t leave my side. For us to stand so full of anger and rage, of loss and deceit and immense hurt, betrayal and frustration and pain, but to say nothing. To feel it all in its overwhelming, burning intensity, but to stay. To look straight ahead, to feel the warmth of her on the end of my arm hairs and to say nothing at all, but to know if we turn, the other will still be there.

That’s how I feel

After all this time, I don't want someone who was never there to go.

'A rock hard pocket of space in my life that nothing except the physical imprint of what was originally there can fill - something that never existed.'

I detonated someone's world, bled black ink through pages of memories and their vision of the future by entering their relationship. Had my heart torn into pieces and was made to bear far too many bullets by the one who promised to protect me, whilst always and relentlessly defending them. The amount of pain I've endured and inflicted, the wasted love that has been flung out aimlessly into empty space and drained away from those who cherished it most, it's been too much too young. I've done more damage in two years than a lot of people do in a life time, to myself, to my friends, and to people who above all didn't deserve it. It's time I leave this pocket of time alone and let it heal. Protect those who truly deserve love and not to reward those who don't, not until they start blunting the sharp edges they use to try to keep people. So I said yes to Manhattan. Not in an 'eat, pray, love' dramatization sort of way, but it's appeared to be an open door at just the right time. One I'd be daft not to step through. There's nothing here for me, not now at least. At just twenty two I've a cut that's bleeding the colour out of my brilliant life, but won't heal under the rushing water of the past, so until I start living my own life for me and can appreciate the vibrancy and wonder my friends bring into my life, the water won't stop running. This is isn't a life I should be bored with, nor feel so lost in. The people who light me up everyday deserve me present not wishing I was dancing with the ghost of somebody else. And I want to be present for them. So I need to swim back from the deep end instead of riding this shallow wave of selfish invincibility created by the tectonic plates of the past. I will return to London older, wiser and more mature, and have the capacity, the genuine emotional availability and above all the memories to take every step with a stroke of colour.

Here's to smashing the fossil.

-

There will always be a version of us in my mind that dance so freely around an empty apartment together, with vintage wine and old records in a life that didn't destroy us, one with no fear or fire, that was built upon boundless 'I love yous', in a life that was never meant to be.

Always, my étoile filante

Soundtrack of right now

The song of us - To be loved; Adele

The train station - Talk me down; Troye Sivan

LB X