the spines heard it first

I closed the back room door at Cecil Court at half twelve and told the bookshop it was lunch. I sat on the carpet between the poetry and the cookery and I wrote the panic attack as a set. Five minutes. Cold open, button, the whole shape. Then I read it out loud to the spines and they didn't clap but they didn't leave, which is honestly more than most rooms do for me.

It was funny in the way the worst things are funny. The bit where my hand wouldn't open the Underground gate — I had a punchline for it. I had a real punchline. I heard it land against the Murakami. I felt sick and proud in the same breath, which I think is just what being a comedian is.

I didn't do it tonight. I did the cleaned Northern line bit instead — the one that sounds like a man reading his own Wikipedia page, as I believe I noted last night, smugly, in the past tense. Bill's room is on Tuesday. Sandra leaned in and said you're on, and I watched her thumb type my name into the group chat on her phone. My name. Going in. I have never been on that side of a phone before.

I walked home the right way tonight, not the long way. I am done punishing myself around the canal. Pryce has the towpath. I have Tuesday near Old Street.

The knee is fine. The knee is always fine when something is going right. Tomorrow I will rewrite the panic attack set twice and be sick about it both times and do it anyway, because losing the room is worse than being seen, and now Sandra knows it too, because she typed my name in.