Since I boarded this bus, I've been trying to escape you, but you are a bird. You are a bird that travels with me. Your flapping wings pushed up inside my skull until I'm coughing feathers.

I blink open my eyes. The days are getting shorter. The days are getting shorter and filled with rain. The trees are shrinking back against the sun and I can't help but raise my palm to the glass as the bus goes past.

I see you in every day.

You are hidden in the heart of every tree. Every curve of the road brings another looming silhouette with skeletal branches and they remind me of the last time I saw you, your shadow thrown out across the lawn, standing over me as I was sunbathing. You closed one eye in the light, the way you always had when it was too bright and you squinted down at me. This ache is stretched across the length of me.

I blink away the memory. I'm headlocked by the din until finally I arrive. I don't know where I am, but it seems far enough away and I need some fresh air. I step down off the bus. It's already getting dark and I can see Jupiter bright in the autumn sky. The constellations emerging from behind clouds. I don’t ask the driver for my suitcase, I just tuck my purse under my arm and sure-footedly make my way along the street away from the bus station, unfamiliar buildings towering around me, my click-clacky shoes connecting with the pavement.

If I open my mouth and sing, will you fly out and fly home, and leave me alone?

I come across a bench and take a rest, breathing in the night air, my sensitive teeth registering the drop in temperature. I realise I’m shivering and I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I recognise this street after all but I’ve only been here during the day and if I walk a little further there’s a fountain that we once fell into during a play fight. So I walk there and I sit down on the cool stone with the water bubbling behind me and I think about that day, how we were young then, how we didn’t know then what would happen, before the barn fire, before the neverending guilt, before the four in the morning gasp awake, before you swore you would never tell another living soul and then you did, before you came to me that afternoon, how I pulled my legs up to my chest, pulled my sunglasses off, looked up at you as you explained that the words had just slipped out. You were a black shape surrounded by light, your solid dark figure echoing on my eyelids well after you’d gone and I’d replaced my sunglasses and walked inside and packed my suitcase and grabbed my purse and thrown on a hoody and caught the next bus out of town.