The afternoon opens wide like a long, unheeded breath, slipping in without announcement and stretching on, patient and indifferent, and I walk Morningside alone now, Sorcha’s stride no longer there to anchor my rhythm, so my own loosens, wanders, drifts sideways through the quiet village streets where sandstone houses stand with their good posture, hedges clipped into neat respectability, windows reflecting back a version of me that looks only temporarily housed, a guest who might slip away before the light changes, and in that mirrored space the inventory begins—not as memory exactly, but as pattern, the sudden recognition that I’ve been humming the same tune my whole life, same key, same melancholy refrain.

     Mattress woman comes first, always a first: body without biography, just heat and weight and borrowed comfort in a room that never bothered to learn my name, the unspoken contract etched into the springs—come, lie down, don’t ask, don’t stay—and leaving was already folded into the bed-frame, effortless, no scene, no echo. Then it’s the Pilton girl, less face than geography: the bus ride that felt like crossing a border without papers, streets that hold themselves differently there, shoulders squared, eyes sharp, no room for soft visitors, and I never knew which self to bring—the visitor, the saviour, the coward—so the uncertainty quietly did the leaving for me. Róisín follows, no longer a woman but a weather system, a pressure zone forever offshore, wanting stretched so thin it turned almost holy, sacred distance that let me adore without arriving, desire without the labour of staying. Others drift in too, unnamed, half-remembered, reduced to rooms and mornings and particular angles of light on bare skin, all linked by the same quiet role I slipped into without audition: comfort, transition, the man-you-have-between-things, temporary shelter that never dares ask to be kept.

     A chemist slides past, then a café, a bus stop smelling of rain and disinfectant, and the realisation lands with a soft thud—I’ve been good at this role, good enough that it hardened into character instead of habit, and habits can bend while characters are expected to stay consistent, stay true to the script even when the script is lonely, and that’s when Sorcha enters the thought: what does she expect, not want—expectation implies duration, mornings stacking like clean plates, mugs rinsed and replaced, the small grammar of presence you can’t fake forever, and why me that night, not as flattering conquest or accident, but as deliberate choice from a room of other possible bodies? I circle the answer without touching it, because touching would mean admitting I might not have been interlude but variable, not filler but alteration, and that slows my feet, narrows the street, makes the village lean in just a little to watch.

     I test myself against her imagined expectations—outlines, not interiors—measuring how long I usually last before the urge to leave sharpens into necessity, how quickly the promise of staying curdles into fear of being known too precisely, seen in ordinary daylight, flawed and human, and all the time the city walks beside me, unbothered, offering no advice, its calm a quiet provocation, and I see how much I’ve relied on noise, motion, intoxication to drown this exact pause, this moment when the pattern steps fully into view, visible enough to name even if I still pretend not to see it. I stop at a corner, watch the light shift on stone, indifferent to my internal audit, and understand the real question isn’t whether to go or stay but whether I can bear the unglamorous work of not deciding immediately—of letting the pattern sit there, exposed, naked, without rushing to repeat it, without running to the next mattress, next bus, next weather system.

     I start walking again—walking is still my default answer—but slower now, more deliberate, concerned even, and the afternoon stretches patient around me, and light bleeds gold at the edges, and the pattern follows me, no longer hidden, no longer shouting, just there, keeping pace, a quiet companion waiting to see if tomorrow I’ll pretend again—or if maybe, just maybe, I’ll let it stay.