1.

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In the morning, every morning, on the escalators.

 

Up and down.

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Side-by-side.

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We are the silent spectres.

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And with our saucer eyes for seeing, or not seeing, we are neither fully in the present, the past or the future.

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*

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When I board the tube train, I stand with my back to the window and let the wind rush through my hair. I like to imagine I am in an old mine cart; rattling past hanging gas lights and searching seams of mineral ore. I am travelling down, deeper and deeper, into the ground. 

              

I open my eyes to see the many hands. There, without their bodies, they are like jaws that bite down around the handrails. I see adverts with headlines as unabashed as, ‘Give me,’ and ‘itch.’ And a woman, sat, writing in a notepad, line-after-line-after-line, ‘I am calm, professional and in control. I am calm, professional and in control. I am calm, professional and in control’. And I wonder where she has been, and where she needs to get to.

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The thing is: our lives are not like tube trains that travel in convenient lines from A to B. We float on a sea – half the time we don’t know where. We are the time travellers. And, accordingly, we are our own ghosts.