K is trying to convince me to come to Trumps tonight for a sticker party. We’re standing outside Drama Bar in the leathery midnight heat, passing a vape back and forth. I bought it today – 5,000 pulls for just €15! – and it’s giving me a contact high with a regulated nervous system. J and I have promised each other we’re going to quit, that we don’t need another vice. But considering the day I’ve had, I’m giving myself a break.

In the morning, The Moment’s bottle of wine is still on the kitchen counter. The liquid inside is more brown than red, slobbery and the label reads five pounds Clubcard Discount. By brown, I mean illogical, in that there’s a crest in the colour, the bits at the bottom deflecting the light, and then sloping upwards into the gradient of day-old tea. It suggests bubbles, or something else suitably full of nothing. I pick it up, and, after a brief inspection, I drink it.

Reading the diary of the one you love would be the only sure way to find out their true feelings. I came in through the door and she was standing in the middle of the room, declaring herself, smiling at me in her cute way, rolling her lower lip like a naughty child, playing caught in the act. ‘I did something bad…I looked in your diary.’

In the block next door to me lives a man with scars running up from either side of his mouth, a violently extended smile. His top-floor flat was once home to a pack of black and white cats he got as kittens, or perhaps bred, but once the cats became old or bold enough, they escaped from their balcony, down to freedom in the concrete streets of East London below. 

When I was 12, or 13 or 14 I had a Joan Baez record. I had about 20-30 records then in my collection. Some were given to me, from my grandfather, and maybe my cousin, who I considered an expert of music at that time (she was a Beatles fan), and some I bought with my own  money, earned from dog sitting, baby sitting and handing out flyers for a nearby second hand store, that paid me too little to stand for hours in the street …

Taking on a lecture titled ‘Why I Write’, Lydia Davis struggles with the why and decides instead to focus on the how. Into the Weeds, a book edited from this lecture, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, started by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell and administered by Yale University, opens with the initial invitation.

I know people know what death looks like and I knew what it looked like before I saw how my mother wore it but there was no way for me to know what she would look like dead until she had died which feels unfair.

The winter wind hitting your exposed skin feels sore; the two collide to create a fissure on the plain of your neck like brittle land. Your hands are red and swollen, ankles charred from the chill.