Imagine.
Imagine spending a whole year locked down in a foreign land without any romance of any kind. And then, at long last, you come back to university in the height of summer, everything is in bloom, people are once more allowed to go outside, and you think: right. Now is the time. Imagine initially hesitantly downloading Bumble but then, that very evening, happening across someone who seems, and I’m not exaggerating, perfect. Just your type. Star-crossed. A blurry polaroid of her mid-laugh at a party with a red cup dangerously close to slipping out of her hand. Her, sitting in a meadow, with a cool patterned headband on, eyes closed, smiling. She has her Spotify linked up to her account and it may as well be a carefully curated synthesis of all of your own favourite music. She drops you a message. You throw one back. Before you know it it’s 4am and you’re giggling under your covers into the pale light of your phone screen and you’re imagining which of the two of you would do the school run for the kids, and what the furniture in the house would be like, and what the first dance song at the wedding might be. And all is well.
Imagine, remarkably quickly, arranging to meet up for coffee. You Wouldn’t Normally Jump Into Things So Soon, But This Time It’s Different. It’s a peculiarly blustery, grey summer’s afternoon, but why would that perturb you? The café’s almost toppling over, delapidated and scarcely perceptible, If You Blink You’d Miss It, hiding halfway down a cramped and cobbled side-street, and amidst the impending monsoon she says, ‘This feels like a good place for a murder’, and you say, ‘Why do you think I brought you here’, and you both laugh and suddenly the inexplicably crazy nerves you were feeling for the previous 24 hours are quelled and the death banter is strong. Over two steaming lattés she tells you about her family and their funny little vocabulary where they use weird words for stuff and it’s a stupid in-joke but it’s nice, and you tell her about how your family always say ‘neville’ instead of ‘level’ because when you were a child you always pronounced ‘level’ as ‘neville’ because you had some kind of strange lisp and your parents have never let you forget it, and she snorts with laughter and apologises but actually it’s very very cute. Imagine going to the bathroom halfway through and realising your cheeks hurt from smiling and thinking, ‘what have I got myself into here?’ Imagine walking her back to her place, shoulders very deliberately touching huddled under an actually quite spacious umbrella, and not even needing to say ‘we should do this again sometime’ because obviously. Imagine, even, kissing. What a whirlwind. Grinning the whole way home in the now-torrential rain.
Imagine seeing each other again, all but three days later, though this time for drinks. Blurting out compliments on each other’s outfits at the same time. Realising their knees have subtly drifted closer and closer to yours under the table, and not minding that whatsoever. The drinks flow as well as the conversation, and now everything’s really gliding along. You take turns doing summaries of your childhoods. She doesn’t know what shandy is so you get her one and she says she will never drink anything else ever again and this is so much better than beer what the hell and you smile at how excited she seems to get by even the most trivial of stuff. You tell her a ‘story’ your dad taught you about how once, when you were young, you were bitten by a rabid dog, and there’s actually a dog’s bone which has grown in the back of your ear as a result, and the doctors can’t understand it and say it’s something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life, and she goes ‘oh shut up what are you on about’ and you go ‘no honestly, feel it, it’s mad’ and then right as she goes to touch your ear you turn around and go ‘RARGHHAGHGARAR’ and she almost falls out of her seat and laughs and slaps you on the arm and the rabid dog banter is strong.
But — but — imagine this. Imagine you stumble out of the bar, after many death stares from the staff who are trying to close up, and start walking up the street past Tesco. And imagine her turning to look along the pavement, making a quizzical face at the ground, and you saying, ‘what’s up?’
‘Nothing. Just- do you ever notice how you never see any homeless people out here at night? Like they’re always sat out front of tesco begging for money during the day and then they’re never here at night, it’s really weird.’
‘Can’t say I have noticed that, to be honest.’
‘Actually, I read this thing online the other week, and apparently the Government send out homeless people every day to go and collect money, and then in the evening they pick them up in vans and put them all in a hostel. It’s all a massive conspiracy to take more money out of our pockets. Have you not noticed before how you never see homeless people after like 10 o’clock?’
IMAGINE. Imagine not knowing whether to scream or run away or pretend it never happened. Imagine quickly ruling out the last option when you look over at her and it becomes clear that she is in fact deadly serious and this isn’t just some horrendously misjudged attempt at irony. Imagine knowing for a fact that there would be 5 mattresses in a row on Little Clarendon Street with homeless people lying shivering on them, with nothing more than threadbare blankets for shelter, and that you could literally go and show her in a matter of minutes, but knowing that that was totally futile because whoever is gonna believe in some crock of shit like ‘homelessness doesn’t exist’ is probably not someone whose mind is easily changed by evidence and reason. Imagine millions of tiny unfinished thoughts racing through your inebriated head in a single horrific moment. How do you live to be 21 years old, by all accounts incredibly smart, three years into your degree in a city whose rough sleeping rate per capita is well over double that of *London*, and yet still believe that homelessness is a conspiracy? How fucking ignorant do you have to be?
Imagine, after what felt like years of internal agonising, not being able to utter anything other than a quiet ‘ooh, dunno about that one’, briskly walking her back to her accommodation, saying you have a deadline tomorrow morning so no sorry you can’t come in (despite not having any deadlines that whole term), and then, once she shuts her door, immediately blocking her on every form of social media possible right then and there on the street. Imagine trudging home back to the other side of the city, to your single bed with no homelessness deniers in it, and thinking to yourself: ‘and I even shaved down there for this.’
