Connections

There's a story in everything, you just have to be looking for it. The birds are always in the trees, but you only hear them call when you're listening out for it. There's an awareness to be taken in everything, if you let yourself feel it in your own hands. Smells are particularly overwhelming when ill, nearly choked in the chemical products section of the discount store. Funny how taste is absent. Salt is good.

I made it out of the house for the first time proper in five days. I managed to buy a paper and ingredients without exhausting myself too much. Economics student, she asked, it took me a while to realise she nodded at my pink paper. I just like the magazines, I told her half heartedly. Walking past F Cooke's I wondered is now the time? It was, I double backed by the community garden and sloped in, unsure how I'd be received with the FT and these glasses. It was fine. A girl in late teens slopped me out a small pie (meat flavour) and mash, with liquor, yes. What it was exactly I'm not sure, a kind of watery parsley sauce. Extra salt and it was amazing.

The girl chatted about some guys passing on the street, kids she'd grown up with, look who has a job, she prided herself. They dipped into the door and I admired her power. She was sure as hell breaking the Personality at Work Act, swearing away as she swept sawdust, why sawdust, you know it's the third time someone's asked that today. Sorry I said, no don't be, I should know why it's there but I don't. She sings exact lyrics to bad r'n'b, and I kind of enjoyed it. She was one of my longest conversations all week. The first was was my parents, oddly.

I love Hoxton Street. Even if there are six police hanging out south waiting for something to come up. Even if I do feel awkward that my hair is this flowing and straight without relaxer. Despite existing in the very throes of a certain middle, I know where I'm from, I know about working. Pie and mash for half the price of posh corned beef in town, ready meals and digestives in place of homemade lasagnes and organic puddings, a whole week of iPlayer and Streetmate re-runs instead of activities I usually call culture. They're all the same really. This bout has loosened me up a little.