London Undone

The Tube doors slide shut with that pneumatic sigh they make, and I'm pressed against a man's damp anorak, close enough to smell his lunch. Onions. It's always onions on the Central line at half four.

Two years in London and I still haven't learned to leave work before the crush. Two years and I still call it the subway in my head, still reach for the wrong word when I'm tired, still half-expect the doors to open onto something that smells like home.

Not that home smells like anything I'd want back. My mother's house smells like cigarettes and that plug-in air freshener she's been buying since 1998, the vanilla one that doesn't cover anything, just layers on top.

The train lurches. I grab the pole. A teenager in a puffer jacket doesn't look up from his phone, and I hate him a little, the way you hate anyone under twenty-five when you're thirty-nine and your feet hurt and you've just spent eight hours in a meeting about a meeting about a spreadsheet.

My stop. Bethnal Green. I surface into gray air and gray light and the smell of fried chicken from the place on the corner. It's not raining, which counts as weather here. I've stopped carrying an umbrella. You either become the kind of person who carries an umbrella every single day of your life, or you become the kind of person who just gets wet. I'm the second kind now.

The flat is on the fourth floor of a building that was probably nice in 1972. No lift. I climb the stairs, past the neighbor who plays the same three notes on a piano every evening at six, past the door with the Takeaway menu taped to it, past the smell of someone's curry, someone's laundry, someone's life.

Inside: my flat. Mine and Priya's, technically, but she's in Lisbon this week for work, so it's just me and the radiator that clanks like it's complaining about something. I drop my bag. Kick off my shoes. The floor is cold through my socks.

I open the fridge. Wine, yogurt, half a lemon going soft, something in a container I don't remember making. I close the fridge.

This is the part where I'm supposed to feel something. That's what people say when you move abroad. They say, "You're so brave." They say, "What an adventure." They say it like you've done something remarkable, like you've climbed a mountain instead of just getting on a plane and staying on the other side.

I didn't move here for adventure. I moved here because I couldn't stay there.

My phone buzzes. A text from my sister, back in Ohio. *Mom asked about you again. She wants to know when you're coming home.*

I stare at the screen. The cursor blinks in the reply box. I type *I don't know* and then delete it. I type *Tell her I'm fine* and delete that too. I put the phone face-down on the counter.

Fine. I'm fine. I have a job. I have a flat with a radiator that sounds like it's dying. I have a Pret loyalty card that's nearly full. I have a life here, or something that looks like one from the outside.

From the inside it feels like holding your breath.

I pour a glass of wine and sit on the sofa, which is Priya's sofa, really, the only piece of furniture in the flat that isn't from IKEA or the street. It's green velvet and it's older than me, probably. Priya found it at a charity shop in Dalston and paid a man forty quid to carry it up the stairs. She's the kind of person who does things like that. Finds things. Makes things happen. I'm the kind of person who stands in the corner at parties and counts the minutes until it's acceptable to leave.

We met at work. She's the reason I stayed, if I'm being honest. Not in a romantic way. In a she-asked-me-to-get-coffee-and-I-said-yes way. In a she-showed-me-how-to-use-the-tube-and-didn't-laugh-when-I-got-lost way. In a she-never-asked-why-I-left way.

I take a sip of wine. It's cheap and it tastes like cheap wine. The radiator clanks. Outside, someone's shouting at someone else, and I can't tell if it's angry or friendly, and that's one of the things I still can't parse here, the way the same words can mean different things depending on the weather.

My phone buzzes again. I don't look at it. I know it's my sister. I know she's typing something else, something that says *she's your mother* or *you can't avoid this forever* or *I'm not trying to pressure you but*. I know because she's said all of it before.

I'm thirty-nine years old. I live in a city I wasn't born in, in a flat that isn't mine, on a sofa that belongs to someone else. I have a job that pays the bills and a phone full of numbers I never call. I have a mother who wants me to come home and a sister who thinks I'm being selfish and a life that looks, from the outside, like a choice.

But here's the thing about choices. Sometimes you make one and it's the right one. Sometimes you make one and you spend two years waiting to find out.

I finish the wine. I don't pour another glass, because I know where that goes. Instead, I get up and walk to the window. The street below is wet, though I don't remember it raining. A woman walks past with a dog, and a man walks past with a suitcase, and a car idles at the corner, its headlights cutting through the dark.

I could go home. I could get on a plane tomorrow and be in Ohio by dinner. My mother would cry. My sister would say she knew I'd come around. I could get a job at the hospital where I used to work, or at the other hospital, the one that's hiring. I could rent a house with a yard and a garage and a driveway that needs shoveling in winter. I could do all of it.

But I don't. I stand at the window and I watch the street and I don't do anything.

The piano starts up. Those same three notes, over and over, like a question that doesn't want an answer. I've never met the neighbor. I've never knocked on the door. I've never asked what song it's supposed to be.

Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I've been here two years and I've never knocked on any doors.

My phone buzzes a third time. I walk back to the counter and pick it up. My sister's name on the screen. I open the message.

*I looked it up. Flights from Heathrow to Columbus are cheap in January. Just saying.*

I read it twice. I put the phone down. The radiator clanks. The piano plays its three notes. And I stand in the middle of the kitchen, barefoot on the cold floor, and I think about January, which is three months away, which is plenty of time to decide, which is what I've been telling myself for two years.