She walks without deciding to walk and the streets choose her instead, chooses her shoes and her tired ankles and the slight lean in her hips that comes from never quite standing straight anymore, and Leith Walk opens like a long mouth of light and rain and kebab-smell and bus-fumes and she lets herself be swallowed, lets the pavement carry her forward in its slow conveyor-belt mercy, and every shop window becomes a brief reflection of a person she does not fully recognise, a person walking with her shoulders drawn in as if the air itself might bruise, and the city makes its ordinary noise around her, the shshhh of tyres on wet stone, the coughhiss of buses kneeling, the click-clack of heels passing with purpose, and she feels both weightless and unbearably heavy at once, as if gravity has become selective, tugging at her thoughts more than her body, and she thinks of how movement once felt like choice, how she once believed that going somewhere meant becoming someone else, and now the going is just going, a drift through streets she half-knows, past the charity shop where the windows are fogged from breath and damp coats and the off-licence glowing with its square of neon promise, and she lets herself be carried past them without entering, without claiming any small warmth, because claiming has begun to feel like a kind of lie, and she watches people through glass as if they are scenes in a film she is not meant to interrupt, small domesticities flickering in rectangles of light, cups lifted, heads bent close, laughter leaking out into the rain before being swallowed by traffic, and she tells herself that this is what it means to move without choosing, to let the city write the sentence of your steps.

     There is a thin, secret pleasure in this, a sweetness she does not quite trust, the pleasure of not having to decide, of letting the world push her from one block of stone to the next, and she feels almost light in it, almost unburdened by intention, and at the same time she is frightened by how easily she can disappear into motion, how easily she can become just another moving shape in the long smear of evening, and she imagines herself years from now still walking, still drifting, still letting streets carry her like water carries leaves, and the thought is both a comfort and a quiet threat, a soft maybe that could turn into a long never, and she turns corners without remembering having turned them and the city rearranges itself around her, narrower now, darker, the lights more hesitant, and she thinks that drifting is a way of not falling yet, a way of remaining in between decisions, in between the heavy nouns of life, and she keeps walking because walking is easier than stopping and easier than choosing and easier than asking herself where she might be allowed to rest, and the rain writes small cold commas on her face and she lets them stay, punctuation for a sentence she does not know how to end.