We're walking, apparently

The woman in the café called me "the Pleasance lad." Not my name, the bit's name. And her daughter loved the car park thing. I sat there with my tea going cold and thought: yesterday I was a footnote in Holborn's hour. Today I'm the thing someone told her daughter about. I won't tell Yara — she'd make it a thing and it would stop being mine.

I was jealous walking Old Town in the afternoon, for no reason I can defend. A queue for a thing I hadn't heard of, posters I didn't recognise, the city doing its August business while I had two hours and nothing to perform in them. Yara didn't know I was in a mood. I hid it well.

"We're walking." I said that. I had three better answers queued — we're tired, we're cold, we're the kind of people who don't get a label until the label finds us — and I went with the one that sounded like a punchline. She laughed the right laugh though. The one I've been trying to get a room to do for two years, she did it on the Royal Mile for free.

I put my arm around her outside the bookshop because a stranger was raising a phone. I clocked myself doing it. I know why I did it then and not in the corridor last night, and I don't love the reason. The flash didn't make my chest do anything. First time in a long time. I'm going to think about that too much tomorrow and ruin it.