Sophie Ratcliffe - The Lost Properties of Love

But sometimes you press the final number, the fatal eleventh, and you hear it ring out. You proceed to Go. You plan and choose what to wear, and buy a ticket, and get on the train, with an excuse in your pocket. You watch the people reading their books – facing each other, back to back. Then you step off the overground, and walk down to the slip road as night falls – and there are still a hundred moments when you can turn back. You can stop at the wharf and think it through, remembering how to compose your life in a way that will hurt neither you nor others. You can stand near the boats and the old warehouses and look at the way the metalwork frames the canal, before walking back down the road to the station. But you don’t. You keep walking and cross the road, turn right after the bridge, following the bend of the path with the stretch of graffiti. The buildings close in on you as you enter the yard. There’s a tension as you get nearer the door. A moment of space that feels as if you’re falling into a doubly indrawn breath – then you press the bell. You know you really should be somewhere else. And up until that moment you can always turn back, or turn aside.

Then you have done it, and the door clicks open. The recoil spring takes over.

Before that moment, though, you are waiting, turning, watching the wheel spin.

You are free, even if pulled by an ache lodged somewhere between your shoulder and your heart. All my life I’ve made journeys like this, detours from the track that I’m meant to be on. The journey feels like a way to a cure, even as it speaks of an illness. Some of us have loved this journey itself most of all, loved it more than arriving.

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