You turn to me and look me straight in the cheek. I’m staring ahead because I get travel sick. We’re on the bus south to Guatemala. I’m by the window. The sun is coming down on the other side of the aisle and there’s a nice light flooding in.

I can tell you’re looking but I’m concentrating on not vomiting on the small child in the seat in front.

“What.” I say.

You carry on staring at my cheek. I know you’re looking at my cheek, and not my eyes or my mouth, because I can see your reflection in the tiny little convex mirror they put next to the ashtray on the seat in front. Nobody is smoking, even though there are no no-smoking signs. I guess it’s normal now.

“I think I forgot something.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No going back now.”

“Yeah. There’s something on your cheek.” You lean a little bit closer and rub my face with your finger. And then you lick it and rub it a little bit more. And then you lean all the way in and lick it with the tip of your tongue, and then,

“What was it?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

I started running a bath and threw in two of the champagne-scented bath bombs that my ex-girlfriend’s mother had given me for Christmas. They didn’t smell like champagne to me. They smelt like bath bombs.

So I threw on the robe that I stole from the hotel we stayed at for Rob’s wedding, and shuffled to the kitchen, leaving the hallway window to steam up slightly as the fog from the too-hot water billowed out onto the landing, and i got to the fridge and found the mostly empty bottle of prosecco that Sally had left open last week after coming home at 6am on her birthday morning, before she’d fallen asleep and decided she was too grown up now (and too alone) for afters. It was flat. I had a sip.

I poured a bit in the bath and it still didn’t smell like champagne. It didn’t even smell like prosecco. It still just smelled like bath bombs.

One summer they rented a little blue tug boat and put a small oven on it and drove it all up and down the canal selling fresh croissants to passers-by on the towpath. They hung a big sign on the side that said “Croissants, £1” in purple felt-tip. Sometimes there would be other boats in the way and they wouldn’t be able to reach the land, so they had a couple of big sticks, one with a little bucket on the end for the pound coins, and one with a little basket to put the croissants in, and reach them over all the way to the bank. Tim said they sold a croissant to David Milliband, once, but I didn’t believe him.

On Sunday we rode the metro to the very North of the city. And we got off at the last stop and went and got two little coffees and a bagel to share and sat outside a cafe with a blue awning and fake snowflakes in the window. We looked at the people in the square and wondered where they came from and where they were going. There was a woman with too many dogs and another woman with not enough. People were doing their Christmas shopping and people were talking on their phones. Some of them were looking where they were going. I could see my breath but my hands weren’t cold because I was wearing the warm green mittens you got me for my birthday. We got another two coffees.

Today’s croissant was a bit too oily. It was still the best.

Good thing it’s just me. I might have been ashamed, had I been sharing my croissant with anyone else. Because I would have said, “try it, it’s the best croissant in Paris! And right on my doorstep!” and they would have tried it, and said, “but it’s quite oily.”

I asked ChatGPT to write me the first line of a story. For inspiration.

In the quaint town of Willow Creek, where every door was a different color, Eleanor discovered an unmarked, black door that appeared only at midnight.

I asked it to be a bit less shit. “Your lines are too oily,” I said.

Eleanor found a midnight-only black door in colorful Willow Creek.

“Still too oily.”

A black door appeared at midnight in a rainbow-painted town.

I thought, where is Willow Creek and why is ChatGPT so obsessed with it?

I googled it and all I got was a link to the Dulux website. It’s a shade of green, and not a very nice one.

The seeds that Sevali had planted in January were growing well.

She’d planted them on a Tuesday night in Dalston. She’d bought them from a seed stall at Columbia Road flower market. She took a razor to each of her arms and made light little cuts, just enough to be able to push a single pip in to each, and for it to stay under the skin without popping out. They’d bled and she’d rubbed in some soil from the bed outside the Rio cinema. They’d been to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, and quite frankly it was disappointing. Although she had been pleased to see Toby Maguire again.

Now it was March and she had flowers growing out her eyes, and worms burrowing through her skull.

All in all, she chalked it up as a win.

This year Autumn missed her alarm. And the night carried on around her, little elves of summer dancing on her eyelids, taunting her, daring her to wake up and tell the trees the party was over, like she always did. And then they would groan as the lights came up and told the leaves they had to go home, as they always knew they would, eventually.

This year the trees carried on partying for weeks. Maybe a month. Then someone thought to check on Autumn. “Wait is she ok?” one said, “she’s fine,” said some spruce, through a gurn. But then another morning came, and they realised how sad and embarrassing it would be if they’d been having all this fun while she was lying dead upstairs.

So the trees tiptoed and creaked up the stairs to check. She was out cold. Out hot? Unseasonable, anyway. They called an ambulance. Summer was over, and Autumn, too.

Inés couldn’t stop thinking, as the grasses parted to let her through, the little fluffy pink and yellow panicles smiling and giggling as they welcomed her in, beneath a pale milky, silty, swirling, cloudless sky, as she made her way from her little hut to the river of light, past the singing cobwebs and the humming trees, she couldn’t stop thinking about what a good deal those shoes were, and what an idiot she’d been to forget to buy them when they were on sale.

There’s a bit of blue up above, just past the awning, but also reflected in the bedrizzled tarmac all around, fizzling past the orange-brown trailblazers of autumn, crunched up and sleeping in little puzzling puddles, who went too fast and too hard this summer and said, you know what, that was a great time, I’m done, let’s give September a whirl.

It’s August 5th and you have one headphone on, the other tucked behind your left ear. There’s a vague natter dribbling in from happy hour locals. And in your right ear something shimmering and infinite.

It was absolutely ages ago.

A caveman, maybe a neanderthal? stood at the edge of a rocky cliff, at the border of a forest, overlooking plains painted by the sunset, with little meandering (actually the technical term here) rivers snaking across them like those shitty marble paintings you did as a kid, which hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had you.

He stared into the distance. He didn’t have any headphones in and didn’t have any sunglasses on, which was fine by him because neither cataracts nor eye cancer were a thing at that point, and Spotify subscriptions hadn’t been invented either.

He was all alone because he’d gone off in a huff, because his mate pissed him off by hogging all the mammoth steaks. But he was feeling a bit calmer now and decided that he might forgive him, although he couldn’t really articulate it because both language and therapy were still in their infancy. So he sighed and said “ug”, and perched himself on a little rock to watch the last of the light.