This is the very beginning of a piece I've been working on for quite awhile. I have quite awhile before I actually finish it but it will be on The New York Times best seller list eventually!
Chapter 1
It’s raining again. It always rains in London in March, so I don’t know why I’m complaining. Maybe I’m just sick of this weather. Or homesick. No, that would be silly. Homesickness doesn’t suit me. I don’t like looking back. I don’t even have a rear view mirror in my car. Well, I wouldn’t have a rear view mirror if I had a car. I prefer the subway. Or rather, my budget prefers the subway. This front window lets in the cold draft from the March air, but I guess at least it’s better than the winter. When I first got to London everything was covered in petals. It looked like a backdrop from a wedding magazine. What no one tells you is that those petals get stuck in your ears and eyes and hair and don’t let you breathe. I don’t even have allergies and I was allergic to them. It was the very beginning of May of last year, and I had barely been out of college for a year when I made the inevitable pilgrimage to the home of my idols- London. Everyone I had ever wanted to be or love was living in England, from England, or buried in England. So, having no prior commitments worth sticking around the United States for, I cashed in each and every one of my hard earned reward miles from my Continental Airlines Debit card, sold my car and most of my other stuff, and hopped a plane to London. It just seemed like a good idea. When I was in college, I always had a boyfriend. I experienced three fine, upstanding gentlemen who managed to leave me bored, angry, frustrated, lonely, and just plain annoyed. So one by one I left each for the next, until finally I realized I was probably the only person I could live with without becoming endless pissed off. So I decided it was time for a change. I stayed with my job in Ohio for a year, but who was I kidding? I was much too young and pretty to be moping around the booming metropolis of central Ohio. At any rate, I moved to add some excitement to my life. My mom was devastated, but then, she was devastated when I moved an hour away for college. My dad was thrilled for me, but I realized I would have to live without his hopelessly unwavering support. After all, who was he, the ex-con, to condemn his cum-laude graduate daughter? But I quickly recovered from that loss, assuming it would be decently easy to replace male support with accented affection. Those British accents are so deceiving. One of them is still strewn across my second-hand queen-size bed. It’s somewhere west of 5am, and instead of cuddling with this lanky Bob Dylan-like creature that seems to have landed in my bed I am making mental love to my laptop. I don’t know if it is my own intelligence or Jim Beam’s that is spitting up all this word vomit, but it feels good. It feels good the way drunken sex feels good in that brief limbo between the sex and the following morning. I was such a good girl in college. I stuck to my boyfriend (whoever he was at the time) and did my homework, saving my drinking only for after school work. I thought I had gotten my crazy days out then. I suppose that’s everyone’s excuse for going out in college- I’ll get out my crazy days, so when I’m an adult I will get up early, go to the gym, drink coffee while reading the Wall Street Journal, and go to bed early. But here I am, 24 years old, wearing a vintage button down shirt and that guy’s boxers, typing on- no, making mental love to- my laptop at 5am. When I officially get up (in five hours) I will crawl over Bob Dylan, make coffee, run my fingers through my matted hair, and scrub off last night’s mascara before getting a quick shower and heading off to my job at the London Star- a tabloid paper distributed too widely outside the Victoria Street Station of the London Underground. I’m not a writer, I’m the girl who shoves a paper into your hand before you know what hit you. You read it on the subway, not giving it a second thought, just like I do. I work from 12 noon til 9 pm every day. Then I go pick up Bob Dylan (why bother with a real name when the man looks like that?) from Camden Town, and he goes to his house. He doesn’t live with me. I love living alone more than anything. Anyway, we go to our respective residences and inevitably, three hours later, at least three or more days a week, we find ourselves at the same bar, talking about life with Jack, the 48 year old bartender. He has been divorced three times, has 5 kids with 5 different women, no car, a tiny apartment one block in the wrong direction from mine, and still manages to have a smile on his face and an ear for my bitching. Bob comes in and complains about his girlfriend. I complain about my job. He asks Bob why he’s still with her. He asks me why I’m still with it. Neither of us can answer our respective questions, so we finish our drinks, tip him heavily, and walk most of the way home with him, most of the way home meaning my apartment. Bob tends to suddenly realize that the subway is too far a walk at 3:24am, and I mention I do happen to have a queen size bed. He apologizes for being an imposition, and I pardon him. We fuck, and we sleep. At 10:05am I make coffee while he showers my scent off of him. We part with a non-committal, “Cheers,” and he leaves. We never talk about it. We never refer to it, never mention it. Sometimes I wonder if it even really happens. Maybe it’s just some drunken sex fantasy I have every time I’m at the bar. I try not to think about it. I enjoy being single very thoroughly. I came to London for that fact. But every girl has needs and mine tend to be met quite well
