home, differently

[homedifferently]

250

X has quit her job. Four months notice, handed in, the 3D printing business going full time, which is brave or reckless or both and I cannot tell her which because she didn't ask and she is grieving and she is doing something with the grief and who am I to say what that should look like. My husband and I discussed it in the tub, which is where we discuss most things now, the hot water finally cooperating or close enough.

He was shaving. Side to side. I was watching his profile the way you watch someone when you are not really thinking about watching them, just looking, and then my mother-in-law's voice arrived in my head — she had said it months ago, that he looked like Harry without the curls, and I had never seen it — and then I saw it. Completely. All at once. His side profile in the steam and the light and I heard Harry's voice, or felt it, or something that wasn't quite either, and I didn't say anything. I sat very still and didn't say anything and waited for it to pass, which it did, the way those moments pass, leaving something behind that doesn't have a name.

The water wasn't too hot. I wasn't going crazy. I just saw something I couldn't unsee and chose to hold it quietly and not ruin the evening with it.

America turns two hundred and fifty today. My cottage is older than America. I have no strong feelings about the birthday. My friends abroad are at barbecues and I am shrugging, which is where I have arrived with patriotism after thirty-six years of being American from various distances. We are having a barbecue only because my husband's friend is coming for board games, which is a perfectly good reason for a barbecue, which is the only kind of reason I need.

I ran to the shops for super glue. Then the bakery for fresh bread. I was sweaty before I got there and sweatier coming back and the heat has settled into the permanent tense now, just the condition rather than the event.

The plumber comes tomorrow.

The toilet has a new leak on the side, which the cottage has produced with the timing of something that knows we are already dealing with things and has decided now is a good moment to add to the list. The Thomas Crapper basin is somewhere in the future, beautiful and heritage and worth whatever it costs, and we are getting closer, one plumber at a time, one leak at a time.

Two hundred and fifty years.

My house was old before the country existed.

I find that, today, the most patriotic feeling I have.

[homedifferently]

The Basin

The bathroom people got back to me. Fifty percent off the Thomas Crapper sink makes it five hundred and sixty pounds. The taps are dummies — decorative, non-functional, which is a thing I did not know taps could be until this moment — and new ones at a discount would be six hundred and seventy. Twelve hundred and thirty-eight pounds for a basin and taps, which I cannot evaluate because I have never bought a basin or taps before and have no reference point for what a basin and taps should cost. I know it is heritage. I know it is made in the UK. I know it is beautiful in the way that the bannister in the ugliest house on the block was beautiful — the wrong house, the house that was wrong in every room, except the stairs, except that one thing that made you want to stay anyway.

I told him I'd speak to my husband.

I chased the plumber who was supposed to call Monday and didn't, which is the ongoing administrative labour of owning a fifteenth-century cottage, the following up, the chasing, the waiting for people to do the things they said they would do on the day they said they would do them.

Someone on AOTY didn't like my metal review and told me I was a special kind of loser. If only they knew about the punk band. The album. The singles on Spotify. The forty thousand listeners the defunct band still quietly accumulates while I am here in Essex being called a loser on a music website by someone whose opinion I did not ask for.

Maddie said if I think Hamilton is a seventy-seven she doesn't trust my opinion. Hamilton is my second favourite musical. Les Misérables is first. I stand by seventy-seven.

Then someone said AI profile picture, laughing emoji, which is what people say now when they see art that looks considered, which is what the internet does with anything that took effort and doesn't fit the template of what effort is supposed to look like. I spent my lunch break taking a photograph of myself and updating every profile. Fine arts and photography Associate's Degree, 2008. I drew the picture myself. You cannot make things anymore without someone assuming a machine made them, which is its own quiet grief, the grief of craft being mistaken for automation.

The curtains came. The bedroom will be dark now when it should be dark.

The basin is beautiful. The bannister was beautiful. Some things are worth the price even when you don't know if the price is right.

I will show my husband when he gets home.

[homedifferently]

The Dongle

I left the USB dongle for my headset plugged into the dock at work. The headset does not function without the dongle, which I discovered this morning in the specific way you discover things that cannot be fixed immediately — with the flatness of someone who knows exactly where the missing thing is and cannot reach it. I found a cable so it works for now. The dongle will either be there next month or it won't. You never can know with offices. Things migrate.

I am tired still. The kind of tired that has been accumulating since before the heatwave, since before the mice and the asbestos and the wasp nest and the broken toilet handle and the wrong HDMI port, the kind that has a history now rather than a single cause.

My boss is in today and I can feel from the screen that he is having a go at me, which is transmitted through the particular quality of certain messages, the tone that arrives before the words have technically said anything. It is always the person who gave out the suggestion they were told to give who gets the difficulty, never the person who gave the suggestion in the first place. The middle position absorbs everything and is thanked for none of it. This is how it works. I know how it works. It doesn't make the screen feel less like a weather system.

The curtains are coming today. The bedroom curtains, the ones we have needed since the first night when my husband said it was very bright and I said I wouldn't know because I was asleep. I am sitting on the couch waiting for the delivery driver, which is the particular suspended state of a morning organised around someone else's timeline.

The dongle is at work. The curtains are on their way. My boss is in a mood that is landing on me from a distance. The fox was there last night and then he walked off.

Today I am just waiting.

The curtains will come and then the bedroom will be dark when it should be dark and maybe the sleep will come differently.

Maybe.

[homedifferently]

Harry

Four thirty in the morning. My mother was in the parking lot of the old church where I grew up, which is where she lives now in the dreams — parking lots, front seats, the geography of childhood — and I had a white hard shell suitcase and a Fjällräven Kånken in navy blue and I was telling her about a work trip and she said that doesn't happen and then the alarm went off and she was gone before I could ask what she meant.

The taxi was £19.60. I am not saving money or time by being in the cottage. I am simply redistributing the cost across different line items and calling village foxes Harry on the way home like a crazy woman and crying because my fourteen-year-old self was not logical in any way, which is the most honest accounting of the commute I can produce.

I forgot my watch. The tan line where it lives was white and obvious and wrong all day. Nobody will know I got my steps in. This is not a real problem and felt like one anyway.

On the tube a man got on at Leytonstone and shouted. Nobody knew what he was saying. Everyone gave him a look. I wasn't scared. It was just the particular oddness of a morning that had already started at four thirty with my mother in a parking lot.

I read about the helicopter crash on the train. An ex-boyfriend who is a pilot had commented on a post — the same one who could be unfaithful and aviation-fluent simultaneously, as it turns out, which is a combination of qualities I did not fully appreciate at the time. Apparently one of the helicopters was unlicensed for commercial flying. X's brother, who left a foundation in his will and whose body is now in Islington, who got into a helicopter on an ordinary work trip. The details keep arriving, piece by piece, each one its own small landing.

Summer fruits custard creams at work. Sainsbury's has decided peach is a summer fruit. I have opinions about this and they are strong.

Active shooter training back home. Gun laws, I keep thinking. Just gun laws.

Egg mayo sandwich. Quavers, which I have discovered I don't like. Biscoff protein bar.

The La Rôtisserie queue was four hours again. I went somewhere else. Outside the restaurant a dead blackbird on the pavement. I noted it. Then inside, the bathroom was Thomas Crapper branded — everything, completely, which I took as the universe making a statement about Saturday's appointment, or maybe just a restaurant that has strong views about bathroom hardware, which I respect.

The tube. The bus. The lane. The fox.

I called out Harry. He stopped. He looked at me directly, which foxes don't usually do, which this one did, standing there in the dark at the end of the lane considering me. I told him he was alright. He walked off.

I don't believe in signs. I have said this many times in this diary and I mean it every time and I also stood in the lane at night talking to a fox I have named after a dead young man who jumped from a bridge on the A40 on the twenty-seventh of May, and I smiled at him, and I meant that too.

My mother said that doesn't happen and then the alarm took her.

The fox walked off into the dark.

I went inside.

[homedifferently]

Poutine

The rain came briefly this morning and then left, which meant the 3D printed resin prints went outside and came back in and went outside again in the particular tennis match of English summer, which is never fully committed to anything for long enough to plan around. Out. In. Out again. The sky doing what it likes.

I washed my hair. Tomorrow I commute. I am ready in the way you are ready when you have laid out what you need and charged what needs charging and confirmed the trains are running and done the mental preparation of a person who has been working from a sloping study and a sittable couch for long enough that the outside world requires a certain amount of readying for.

Poutine for dinner, which is chips and gravy and cheese curds and the kind of meal that asks nothing of you except to eat it, which is the correct ask on a Tuesday in a heatwave that has briefly relented into rain.

France plays tonight. I hope they win. I have no particular reason to support France except that I do, the way you support things without needing a reason, the way you pick a side and stay with it.

The resin prints are outside again.

I am watching the sky.

[homedifferently]

Albums

I woke up with a headache. My period is heavy in the way it is always heavy on the second day, which is its own kind of information about what the body is doing and why it needs to be somewhere quiet and horizontal. The heatwave has settled into itself, which is different from being over — it has simply decided this is where it lives now and has stopped announcing itself as unusual.

The washing is out. More is on. The dishes need doing. The recycling needs taking out and the bin is full but I think there is room on the side, which is the kind of problem that is just a problem and not a metaphor for anything.

I found AOTY yesterday. Album of the Year, the website, which is a rabbit hole dressed as a catalogue and I have fallen into it completely, eating albums the way I eat anything I find interesting which is all at once and without pacing. Then Backloggd, which does the same thing for video games, and now I am sitting here trying to reconstruct every game I have ever played in my life, back to the beginning, which is harder than it sounds and will take longer than I have and I will do it anyway.

It will never be as hard as being an adult orphan.

I wrote that at the end and then sat with it. The phrase that arrived at the board game night and has been sitting in my chest since, trying on its fit, settling. Adult orphan. What I am. What I have been for long enough now that the grief has changed shape several times and is changing still, this morning, with a headache and a heavy period and the washing on the line in the heat that has decided it lives here now.

It will never be as hard as losing someone to a bridge.

Harry. The A40. The fatal descent. The foxes in the dark on the walk home that I let myself believe were him for the length of one street because the night was warm and he was gone and the foxes were there and sometimes that is what you have.

The dishes. The recycling. The albums. The games I played as a child that I am trying to remember, which is its own kind of archaeology, digging back through the years to find what was there, what I touched, what I loved before I knew I was keeping track.

I am keeping track now.

Of everything.

[homedifferently]

Blocked

The bathroom appointment happened. Two plumbers' details. No figures yet, no timeline, no sense of what this is going to cost, which is the stage we are at, which is better than the stage before it where we had no plumbers' details at all. X likes Thomas Crapper. We move forward incrementally.

My period arrived four days late, which the heatwave will do, which the body will do when the heat advisory says forty degrees and significant disruption to daily life and means it. I am not surprised. I am relieved in the specific way that lateness resolves into relief, the kind that arrives with cramps and is welcome anyway.

I sent a congratulations text to my husband's best friend from primary school. The one who had the baby last week. Standard, polite, kind — congratulations on the new baby, two kisses, both our names. I noticed something felt off and checked in a private browser and he has blocked my number.

I want to sit with the smallness of this and also with the fact that it doesn't feel small. Not right now. Not when I am physically depleted and four days late and the heat is still forty degrees and the bathroom has no figures and I am already carrying Harry and x's brother and my grandmother's funeral I couldn't get to and the asbestos and the mice and the wasp nest and the broken toilet handle and the wrong HDMI port and all the rest of it. Not when I sent a kind message and received a block.

You don't block a number for a polite congratulations text. My husband says maybe he didn't realise it was me. This is a kind thing to say and also not true. People know. You know whose number is whose.

Is it the bully godfather, the social climbing, the baby making people strange and selective about who they let near a new life. I don't know. I won't know. That's the particular cruelty of a block — it ends the conversation before it can be had.

I am sitting here feeling incredibly mean-spirited things have been done to me for no reason I can locate, on a hot evening in a cottage that requires constant management, with cramps, and I am trying to remember that this is one person's strange decision and not a verdict on anything.

It doesn't entirely work yet.

It will.

[homedifferently]

Sky TV

I was losing my job in the dream because I had shared a link in Teams. I don't know where the link went. The dream didn't specify and I didn't think to ask, which is how these things go — the reason arrives fully formed and unexamined and feels completely sufficient. I was in a cab in Cuba crying, which is a very specific place to receive bad employment news, wondering how anyone gets a job in this economy, which is a question that belongs to both the dream and the waking world equally.

Then I woke up. My husband got out of bed because he was boiled, which he is every night now, which the heat advisory predicted and which we are living. I fell back to sleep.

Sky TV, this time. Thousands of channels, my husband said, come and look, and we sat together flipping through them and everything was Christmas. Every channel. Christmas in July, the decorations and the carols and the particular visual grammar of a season that had arrived six months early and colonised the entire schedule. I said they'd forgotten his mother's birthday, which falls on a holiday near Christmas, which the programming had apparently also failed to account for. He laughed. He said I should phone her and tell her.

Then the alarm went off.

Two dreams and an alarm and the heat still here, the red advisory still on the app, the desk in the study waiting with its empty drawer, the room stuffy, the HDMI in the correct port this time. My husband boiled beside me and then not beside me and then beside me again. Cuba and Sky TV and Christmas in July and a shared link that ended everything.

The economy, even in dreams, is not reassuring.

His mother's birthday is before Christmas and I will remember it.

[homedifferently]

As It Was

Harry Styles was singing As It Was and we were walking through a fairground, which is the kind of dream that has the texture of a good evening — the lights, the noise, the particular energy of a crowd gathered around something. An Asian couple told us we weren't couple-y enough, which we found offensive in the way you find things offensive in dreams, immediately and completely, and walked away while people screamed on some twisty turny upside down ride somewhere behind us. The couple drank pints of blonde lager. We walked.

Then someone tried to hop the fence. The police went after them. The person had an AK-47 and a dragon tattoo down their arm and a white wife beater and there was fire in the distance, which is the moment a dream about a Harry Styles concert becomes something else entirely, the way the atmosphere of a thing can change completely between one second and the next.

Then I woke up.

The heat is still here. The advisory is still red. The desk is built and working, HDMI in the correct port, the drawer still empty, the room still stuffy in the way that top floors of old buildings are stuffy in heat that the Met Office has described as extremely rare for the UK, which means we are all learning something new about what England can become.

As It Was is a song about things not being what they were and the difficulty of accepting that, which the dream chose for a fairground and a couple walking away from an accusation and fire in the distance, which is either random or not, and either way I was there with my husband and we were offended together and walked away together and that is, in the end, what couple-y enough actually looks like.

Not performing it for strangers drinking lager.

Just walking away together.

[homedifferently]

The Wrong HDMI Port

The desk is built. My husband built it, not me, because I have established my position on building things and it has not changed. I moved all my things onto it immediately, which felt like the correct response to a desk that has finally arrived after the hedges incident and the heat and the waiting, and then my husband texted to say he was annoyed because he hadn't finished clearing the room first.

Oops.

I ran up and down the stairs moving things in the heat, which produced a quantity of sweat that I am not going to describe in detail except to say that the heat advisory was correct and I am living proof of it. Then I sat down at the new desk and could not get the PC to work and spent an hour, a full hour, investigating the situation before discovering that I had the HDMI cable in the wrong port. Not the wrong cable. Not a broken monitor. Not a failed graphics card. The wrong port. I had plugged it into the wrong hole and then spent sixty minutes treating this as a mystery requiring investigation.

I am not going to say I am useless because I said that about the rotary dryer and the table legs and the toilet handle and the light switch plates and the times I couldn't get the furniture up the stairs and I was wrong each time, or mostly wrong, and I eventually figured it out or my husband did and either way it got done.

But the HDMI port.

An hour.

It is so stuffy up here. The study slopes and the room holds heat the way old rooms hold heat, which is completely and without ventilation. The desk is the right size. The drawer is still empty. The monitor is working now, plugged into the correct port, displaying exactly what it is supposed to display.

Outside it is still forty degrees and the Met Office is still warning us and the neighbours have heard me scream about a spider and about nothing and I am sitting at my new desk in a hot room in a fifteenth-century cottage sweating through my clothes.

It is working though.

Everything, eventually, is working.

[homedifferently]

Heat Wave

The advisory has not changed except to confirm itself. Thirty-seven to forty degrees. High humidity. Nights too warm for recovery. Significant disruption to daily life likely, which I am experiencing as: leftover key lime pie for breakfast, laundry in the heat, and a red spider in my hair.

The spider. I was bringing in the washing and felt something and looked and there it was, red, small, making its way up toward my hair with the confidence of something that had not been informed it was unwelcome. I screamed GET OUT OF MY HAIR at the top of my lungs, which the neighbours heard, because in this heat everyone's windows are open and sound travels. The spider did get out of my hair. I achieved this by throwing a box of pancake mix at it, which I want noted as both effective and proportionate. Then I put on more washing and retired to the couch.

Aftersun. Such a well made film. I watched it in the heat and felt things I didn't entirely have words for, which is what a well made film does, which is why it is well made.

My husband's friend had his baby yesterday at twelve fifty in the afternoon. They named her after his grandmother, which is a good name, a name with history in it, a name that means something to someone. They made the godfather a man from school who used to bully him, who used to tear his work in half — literally, the paper in two pieces — and who now has more money than sense, which apparently qualifies him for the role. I don't understand it. I am not going to fester on it. It is forty degrees and festering requires energy I do not have.

Pizza last night because the heat made cooking theoretical. Key lime pie this morning because the heat makes breakfast negotiable. The washing is on the line. The spider is somewhere in the garden, probably, reconsidering its approach to hair.

Martha Reeves knew what she was talking about. It's like a heat wave. It's burning. It's tearing things apart.

Though she was talking about something else entirely, which the heat makes feel less distant than usual.

[homedifferently]

37 Celsius

Keir Starmer resigned and the television played his speech across every channel for an hour and a half, which is the kind of coverage that assumes we have not already understood that he has resigned and want to understand it more deeply through repetition. The whole family was done with it by the twenty-minute mark. He was an alright Prime Minister. He accepted suits and Taylor Swift tickets in exchange for money, which is bad, but the bar for bad has been significantly recalibrated in recent years and he was not the devil Farage makes him out to be. Nobody in this house is making that argument.

My mother-in-law told us all about the Fury family. She asked each person individually if they could guess the name of the oldest child. Venezuela. The child's name is Venezuela, which is a country in South America and not a name, or shouldn't be, or is now apparently both.

The new hygienist at the dentist has a strong accent. Polish or Russian or Latvian or Bolivian, somewhere with winters. She asked if I smoked. No, never, except once in Amsterdam which doesn't count and which I did not mention. She asked what I drank. Water, squash, tea without sugar, milk. She told my husband to stop using mouthwash. She gave me microbiome toothpaste for sensitive teeth, which I don't have except on the day someone is cleaning them, which I think is just teeth. Two meals a day is ideal, she said. I nodded. We don't go back until January.

Taco Bell on the way home to charge the car. Crunchwrap Supreme, soggy tostada, insufficient sour cream. I ate it anyway because the heat had taken something out of me and the crunchwrap was what was available.

The desk arrived. The driver had left it in the hedges, which is a choice. The weekend bag arrived, faster than expected. I got out of my clothes immediately and ran a cold bath, which was not as cold as I needed, which is what happens when the ambient temperature is pushing forty degrees Celsius and the cold water has given up on being cold.

The weather app has escalated to a third alert. Thirty-seven to forty degrees expected. High humidity. Very warm nights preventing recovery. Significant disruption to daily life likely, which is the Met Office's way of saying: this is not normal and you should take it seriously. It is like Ibiza or Arizona without the context of having chosen to go somewhere hot. England has simply become somewhere hot without asking anyone.

The bathroom designer is named Sacha. She likes Thomas Crapper, which is either a very good sign or exactly what you'd expect from someone whose job involves being enthusiastic about bathroom fixtures. I am hoping she can find me something in the Thomas Crapper aesthetic at a price that acknowledges we have already spent a considerable amount of money on a fifteenth-century cottage that has mice and a broken toilet handle and asbestos in three very low risk locations and a wasp nest that is gone and a loft I cannot enter without an N95 mask.

Saturday. Sacha. Bathrooms.

My stomach is full of crunchwrap. The period may start today, which the body has been threatening for the last forty-eight hours with the particular timing it favours, which is always inconvenient and always exactly on schedule.

The desk is in the hedges. The country is forty degrees. The Prime Minister has resigned.

I'm going to lie very still and try not to generate any additional heat.

[homedifferently]

The Foundation

We dropped the car off to be serviced and walked everywhere in the heat, which was the kind of heat that makes every errand feel like a minor expedition requiring more preparation than it received. IKEA first, where I ate a hot dog with mashed potatoes and onions, which is either the best or the worst thing IKEA does and I maintain it is the best. Then Dunelm. Then the tool shop, which was racks upon racks of wrenches and screwdrivers in every conceivable configuration, and I stood there thinking about my parents who never owned a wrench set, who phoned a plumber, who managed without the tools and somehow managed anyway. Then the world foods shop for the Polish crisps and the Korean carbonara ramen, which are the things I go for and always will. Then a taxi home because the heat had made its point and we had received it.

The Prime Minister has resigned. I note this the way you note weather.

Yesterday I tried catfish for the first time. It tasted like peppery, mouldy, lemon, river water soaked fish in a light dusting of coating, which I texted to my friend because she would understand the specificity of that description and find it funny.

She replied about her brother.

His body is back in the UK. He is being buried in Islington. The foundation he wrote into his will before he died — before the helicopter, before the jet fuel, before the ordinary work trip that wasn't — will go ahead. Everything to the foundation. His ex-wife is not contesting. More joy, love, and art spread into the world. His final wish, written down in advance, which means he knew something about what mattered and wrote it somewhere permanent before the impermanent thing happened.

My husband was shocked she isn't contesting. I wasn't. Some people know when to let something be what it was meant to be.

I told her I was glad he was home.

We packed our bags and drove out to the in-laws in the heat, the long drive through the red-warning afternoon, the fields doing what fields do in heat which is shimmer and dry and look like somewhere else. I thought about the foundation. About writing something down before you go, about knowing what you want to leave behind, about the difference between a will that divides things and a will that continues something.

He spread joy and art and love and he wrote it into law before he left.

There are worse ways to have been here.

[homedifferently]

Queen of the Cottage Pirates

The weather app has a red symbol on it. Not the amber of mild concern or the yellow of keep an eye on this but red, which is the colour reserved for things the meteorological service wants you to take seriously. Low to mid thirties today. Mid thirties Tuesday. Humidity accompanying it like an uninvited guest who has also brought luggage. Temperatures remaining above twenty overnight in urban areas, which is the kind of detail that sounds technical until you are lying in a fifteenth-century cottage at two in the morning wondering why sleep won't come and the answer is: the air.

I took a cold bath and did not complain about the cold. This is the heat stroke accomplishment of the day. The bubble bath produced no bubbles, which is its own quiet betrayal, but the cold was good in the uncomplicated animal way that cold is good when the body has been too warm for too long. I got out and felt approximately human.

We bought a desk. My husband insisted it have a drawer. I do not need a drawer. Everything I own for desk purposes fits on the desk surface without requiring a drawer, which I explained, and we compromised on a small drawer, which I will put nothing in, which will stress me out in the particular way that empty designated spaces stress me out by implying I am not organised enough to fill them. It is a desk though. Larger than the four-slot Kallax I have been using since we moved in. Progress of a kind.

My husband mowed half the lawn for the first time since we moved in. He found a pair of women's torn up underwear by the shed and ran toward me with the energy of someone delivering significant news. They were not my underwear. I explained this. He said oh. A fox, probably, or the wind, or the particular randomness of what ends up in gardens that have been gardens for five hundred years and have seen everything. They went in the bin without further discussion.

After dinner I ordered sun hats. Straw ones, for gardening, which means I am going to be in the garden in a straw hat looking exactly like Monkey D. Luffy, which I have decided to embrace completely. Queen of the Cottage Pirates. There are worse things to be.

I also ordered a San Diego tee on clearance because all my graphic tees had holes in them and needed recycling and because you cannot, it turns out, fully extract the American from a person regardless of how long she has lived in Essex in a fifteenth-century cottage eating from a bakery where the baker knows her name. The San Diego tee exists. I bought it. I am not apologising.

The drawer is empty. The hat is coming. The lawn is half mowed. Somewhere near the shed there are no longer any unaccounted-for underwear.

The red symbol is still on the weather app.

Tomorrow it gets hotter.

[homedifferently]

3D Pipes

The dream gave me Thorpe Park, rented out entirely for my work team, which is the kind of corporate generosity that only exists in dreams and away days that haven't happened yet. There was an arcade in a warehouse, or the backstage of a concert venue, the kind of space that is several things at once and none of them quite right. I followed colleagues until we reached the stairs, which were not stairs but pipework — the old Windows 95 screensaver, 3D Pipes, the ones that built themselves across the screen in primary colours until the whole thing was plumbing for no reason. I decided not to go up. I turned back.

Then my husband and I were waking up on a church pew and everyone had gone home and we had been left to clean up Thorpe Park and hand in the keys, which is the kind of responsibility that arrives in dreams without explanation and feels entirely reasonable until you wake up. There was a massive communal container of Cocoa Pops that someone had abandoned. Two pairs of watermelon print flip flops that I told my husband I had won, which I had decided in the dream and which he did not contest.

Then he started getting angry about his toothbrush not being charged and listing the reasons I am terrible, which the dream produced with the specific efficiency of anxiety, the list arriving before I could respond, and then a cheerful woman appeared from somewhere with champagne and a massive smile and we said no thank you and handed her the keys and that was that.

I woke up.

The cottage was quiet. My husband was there, not listing anything, just asleep, which is how he actually is, which the dream does not always remember. I lay there for a moment thinking about the 3D Pipes, which I had not thought about since approximately 1997, which my unconscious apparently archived and retrieved at need. The screensaver that built itself and built itself until the screen was full and then it started again.

Some days feel like that. Full and then starting again.

The watermelon flip flops were very good though.

I would have worn them.

[homedifferently]

Adult Orphan

Canada won. I wanted them to win and also I support Qatar, which is a position I am comfortable holding without resolving it. Tonight America plays and I have feelings about this too, which is what it is to be American from a distance, to care about a team representing a country you experience mostly as a passport and a citizenship and a cold sweat.

I went to the London Lonely Girls Club last night. At least fifty women, various ages and backgrounds, board games and drinks and the particular atmosphere of a room full of women who have decided to show up somewhere alone and make it into something else. I played On Mars on Alice's team. In between turns we played Cat Taco Pizza or whatever it's actually called and I won an off-brand Stanley in a vibrant azure blue, which I am choosing to receive as a sign that the universe is correcting itself after the Huel and the off-brand Crocs.

The woman to my right checks her husband's browser history when he's away on business. He messages OnlyFans women and buys their photographs. She told the whole table this with the openness of someone who has been carrying it alone and needed somewhere to put it down. Everyone said grow a backbone, dump him. I was too shocked by the disclosure itself to say much. I would never. Not about my husband, not at a table of strangers, not anywhere. Some things stay inside the house.

The woman to my left was Thai British. Her father left her mother for a Thai masseuse he met on a work trip. She said men are pigs and she will never marry and she said it with the calm certainty of someone who arrived at this conclusion a long time ago and has made her peace with it. I listened and did not argue.

Someone asked me what it's like to be an adult orphan.

I had never heard that phrase before. Adult orphan. I sat with it for a moment, the way you sit with a word that names something you have been carrying without a label, and I didn't say much, which is unlike me, which tells you something about what the phrase did when it landed. Adult orphan. That's what I am. I have a word for it now and I don't entirely know what to do with the word.

Alice was calm and collected for someone who lost her brother in an aviation crash two weeks ago, which is either how she processes things or how she performs processing in public, and I did not ask which because it was not the moment. For a very brief second I thought about my ex-boyfriend with his pilot's licence, the helicopter rides, the times I sat in the passenger seat of something he was flying. Then I stopped thinking about it because the past doesn't matter and I was back in the room with the board games and the azure blue Stanley.

The dip at the venue was extraordinary. Fake salmon, vegan capers, Dijon mustard, guava, white fake cream cheese, tortillas. I could have eaten the entire bowl. A matcha vanilla mocktail with a real vanilla bean pod draped over the edge, which I suspect cost more than the mocktail itself. Vanilla is not boring. Vanilla is expensive and specific and the people who call it plain have never priced a vanilla bean pod.

Alice got fuzzy dice for her car. I stopped at the Asian offie for tempura seaweed for my husband. We passed the world's smallest ASDA and I got him limited edition poutine crisps for the World Cup.

Adult orphan.

I have been saying it quietly to myself since, trying it out, seeing if it fits. It fits. I wish it didn't.

Hot dog, popcorn, coffee in a cup. Come on America, win the Cup.

[homedifferently]

Hold My Beer

England won the football. For approximately thirty seconds I was not in cottage hell. I was just a person watching a winning score with the uncomplicated joy of a result going the right way, meat pie and sausage roll energy, come on England, and they did. Then snap back to reality, as the song goes, which in this case was a toilet that no longer flushes.

The handle broke. Not in the standard way that handles break, which would be manageable, but in the way that involves a rusted metal pin that links the outside handle to the internal flush pump, which has snapped through completely, which means pulling the chain swings the handle arm uselessly in the air like a question nobody is answering. I know this because I got out the step ladder and cleaned my glasses and had a proper look, which I want noted, because I was not raised as some DIY-girly-pop-fix-it-yourself type. My parents phoned a plumber. Every single time. This is not a personal failing, it is a parenting philosophy, and I have inherited it completely.

My husband said just put the handle back on. I said how. He said why can't you do it. This exchange happened and I am recording it accurately.

He will come home tonight and say hold my beer. He will fix it in eleven minutes with a piece of wire he finds somewhere and he will be faintly annoyed that it wasn't already done, which is the particular domestic dynamic of two people who were raised by entirely different philosophies about what counts as fixable and by whom.

In the meantime I have learned to manually flush a toilet, which is a life skill I did not have this morning and now have, which my parents did not teach me because they probably didn't know it either, which I figured out by myself with a step ladder and clean glasses and whatever portion of my brain handles emergencies that are not emergencies but feel like emergencies when the toilet won't flush.

I am proud of myself. Nobody else needs to be. I am enough.

The pin is rusted through. England won. The cottage requires constant management and occasional structural investigation and I am, by any reasonable measure, managing it. One toilet at a time. One rusted pin at a time. One hold my beer at a time.

We are fine.

The football was good.