She steps out of the underground with the sound of the city coughing itself awake around her and the stairwell breathes steam and old piss and wet iron into her face and the street above exhales a low animal murmur of buses and distant laughter and the unplaceable howl of a siren folding itself into the brickwork, and the night is not quite night here but a smudged half-light where shopfronts flicker and neon stutters and the rain-polished pavement keeps replaying the same orange reflection as if memory itself were stuck in a loop, and she stands for a moment at the lip of the stairs feeling the vibration of everything moving without her and the weight of her own stillness pressing inward, and her hands do not know where to go so they hover and then fold and then release again, performing small rehearsals of belonging that never quite reach their cue.

     And the city takes her in without noticing, as cities do, the way rivers take in rain without ceremony, and she moves with the flow of bodies and the crosscurrent of thoughts and the ripple of her own nameless ache, and every window she passes becomes a version of a life she might have inhabited and every doorway becomes a mouth that could have spoken her into something else, and the smell of fried oil and wet coats and cheap perfume braids itself into her lungs, and she remembers a kitchen once where light fell kindly on chipped mugs and someone said stay as if it were an easy word, and the memory clicks and unclicks like a faulty switch, refusing to hold, stuttering between almost and never.

     The street answers her with its own language of footfall and brake-screech and wet tyres whispering over stone, and the buildings lean in close enough to listen but not close enough to care, and she walks as if she were being slowly unstitched from herself, thread by thread, leaving faint strands of presence on railings and lampposts and the soft bellies of doorways, and the cold finds its way through the seams of her jacket and settles behind her ribs like a small animal curling up to sleep, and somewhere between one crossing and the next her reflection ghosts itself into a darkened bus window and she does not recognize the girl there because the face has begun to carry weather in it, small storms behind the eyes and a tiredness that belongs to years she hasn’t lived yet, and she wonders if faces grow older faster than bodies, if sorrow leaves fingerprints on bone, if the skin remembers things the mind tries to misplace, and the thought spirals into a soft static hum, a thinking-noise that does not answer but keeps her company like a radio tuned between stations, a low shhhh of existence that fills the hollow spaces.

     Then a group passes her laughing too loudly, joy sloshing out of them in careless spills, and the sound grazes her like something once familiar but now out of reach, and she feels briefly transparent, a thin sheet of personhood the world looks through rather than at, and she wonders when exactly she learned to walk like this, half-step, side-step, making herself small for corridors that are already wide enough, and the wondering has no beginning she can touch, and the street narrows and then widens again and the city performs its endless trick of becoming many cities at once, old stone and new glass stitched into a restless skin, and she drifts through them without passport or promise, carried by footfall and pulse and the thin, persistent gravity of being here, and the bridge is not yet visible but it has begun its quiet work already, tugging at her from somewhere beyond sight, a word not yet spoken but already forming in the mouth of the night, a shape she does not know she is walking toward and yet somehow is.