Tired. Too much work at work, too much work post-work, and not a whole lot of sleep going around. I wake up and it’s too hot, I kick the covers off me, I look at the clock, and it’s two-thirty in the morning, or four, or six, and I’m tired still, the burning behind the eyes, the head heavy, and still sleep elusive, and already the day’s to-do list mechanically unravelling like a till receipt kachnk-kachnk-kachnk in my mind. Sometimes I wake up happy, and it’s because I was dreaming I was running, the road and the running and the wind, and little else.

There are still moments, though, for there are always moments. Today I took my packed lunch outside to the patch of lawn by the carpark, I sat on the cold concrete in the shade and leaned back against the brick wall, my legs from the knees down were in the sun, and the warmth spread up and good. Suz was on the phone, and there were cotton-ball fairies dancing every which way in the breeze.

Sunday I spread out a white tablecloth on the green in Saint James’s Park and the sun seeped in and I was lazy all over. A girl all curly and girly was too small for the stripey deck chair, and her stubby legs kick-kicked in the air while her father blew soap bubbles that carried secret messages over the daisies.

“We’ll go and eat fish in Brittany,” he says, and he says “We’ll spend a year in a cinema, watching all the films you haven’t yet seen,” and I say Okay because it’s a nice idea and because he’s nice and because of the cinema, and the cool, the dark, the glow of the big screen. I’ll tell you a secret, sometimes I turn around to look through the window of the projection room, I like to see the reels turning and I like to follow the ray of light towards the front, I like to see the bits of dust floating in its path. He says things to make me smile and in the back of my mind I think about the visa that expires in a matter of months, about the rules, the regulations, the stipulations. I smile and what comes out of my mouth is Okay because I don’t know what else I can say.

But there are moments, is the thing, and the thing is, I look in the mirror and my shoulders are brown already, summer’s upon us, and it’ll be skirts and dresses and picnics and kisses and reading in the sun for days on end.