The clip has legs

The clip has legs. That's the thing I keep turning over. Millions of people, fine, whatever, but a bloke in a big jacket on a towpath knows my face. He smelled of lager and he was cheerful about it — oi, you, you're the panic attack one, aren't you — and I said no like the word had been loaded for me. Like the lie was already in the chamber before he finished the sentence.

I went down on one knee in the mud. That is the picture, isn't it. Some chancer on a wet path recognising me from a clip I made about my own chest stopping. He laughed and walked on and I sat there with my phone in my hand and a half-finished text to Fi about mum that I never sent.

What was I even going to say to her. I don't know. Something about how mum would have called it funny. Something about how I haven't rung her in weeks. I left it half-done, and that is a more honest thing than anything I could have finished.

I cooked pasta standing up because sitting down felt like settling. The radio off because I didn't trust myself not to listen for the joke in the room. Then the notebook, and the towpath thing came out flat, like I was already performing it. The moment I write it down it stops being mine and starts being material. I hate that I can't keep a thing for myself.

On the tube this evening I stood behind a man whose shoulders kept making me think of Pryce. I don't know why I let Pryce into my head that way. Pryce would have walked that path with his hands in his pockets and talked the bloke round. Pryce would not have slipped.