How it Ends

After the last train had departed, I held a small piece of black plastic attached to a lamppost in one hand and my phone in the other hand. Strange to become aware of moments that will haunt us in the future as they occur in the present. Strange, no less, the amplified presence of things in the world, especially those that become impregnated with a sense of endings. Stranded. Stranded in a foreign night, marked by foreign faces. After I let the plastic go, a slow walk toward the underground. A slight opening in the iron railing - you go first this time - shortened the descent below street level. Shortly after that, I was alone in the carriage.

Time is coming in, and the past is creating several layers that overlap the other. In the early hours of Sunday morning, I was sifting through those layers, as they spread themselves out in the dark streets of West Hampstead. A strange return to different lives. At the junction between West End Land and Dennington Park Road, time has become compressed, seized in a state of contradiction. Stranded in a place that was once a home, that same place has now taken on a different life, a life in which that history is now forgotten.

And tonight, in the hours afterwards, I am watching so many shadows from the past that it has become impossible to keep up. Eyes affixed on a partly lit scene, a glimpse of intimacy afforded by distance. So many worlds disconnected in time. Tonight, feverish and fatigued, I have trespassed into these worlds. They are brought together by the ruins of experience, endings that overlap with previous endings. An entire city colonised by the debris of memory, and an identity caught between that debris.