My walk home is over an hour long. Every Friday, the bars lining Kingsland Road and Shoreditch High Street fill up and spill the sidewalks with nine-to-fives on their week-over unwind. I needle in between them and on, running a blanket stitch straight to my front door, stopping only to empty my pockets of everything save a single key before turning the corner towards the playground.

Getting up the slide in a pencil skirt is tricky. But it’s the best way I know of slipping into the weekend. Halfway down, momentum gathers—I’m lighter than air when I hit the ground hard. Grey pinstripes stream out the underground station in a curved blur, until the merry-go-round halts to a stop. Power heels and tired eyes sharpen, exactly as they disappear. I stumble off and flop face-up on the hammock swing by the fence. I peer at the Tower of London, across the street. It stands awkwardly on its feet, unsure of what to say to the pop-up bistro posed beside it. I pull back: yellow cranes cut the skyline, stirring stone turrets with glass scrapers. 

I am comfortable in this city as it straddles yesterday and tomorrow, with me. Working my first full-time job fills my days, often late into summer twilights, with an adulthood I am not ready for. Swinging into the sky reminds me that I was a child not too long ago, and can be one still, on a part-time basis. Twenty-one allows a whimsicality, even if it’s always fleeting. 

En route to the rest of the night—there will be empty bottles on the patio floor, money speed-spent and forgotten by morning—I wait to cross. The traffic lights blink at a road emptied by the yellow tape wrapped around it. There is a long-bodied lorry parked, ashamed, to one side; a neon policeman paces beside it. There has been a fatal accident, a fact stated with an authority so procedural, it sounds cheerful in its facelessness. I see a bicycle lying on its side on the gravel. Its handlebars are slightly askew, like a limb broken by the brittle bone inside it. 

I stood staring for a long, long time, dinner’s greasy curry going cold in its plastic carton. Before falling out of balance as I sped around a curve, I too, rode everywhere without a helmet. I never slowed down because the wind in my face felt too good when it came fast. Often, I’d swerve into new paths because they made me feel bold in a world whose static I felt I could control with a single turn.

I think growing up comes at the point when the kind of whimsicality that invites speed is, for the most part, forced behind. When I was a child I never entertained consequences because I lived surrounded by eyes that always saw them for me. But alone, I am beginning to understand the only eyes around me, in this preoccupied metropolis, are my own. And they won’t be able to save me if they’re open only when looking to the stars. 

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This essay was written for Rent and Ice Cream, a project I collaborated on with designer Oliver Ballon. I wrote, he designed, and back then it felt like we could afford neither our rent nor ice cream.