You are leaning over the railing that protects us from this city’s roaring edge; I am eating salad with a plastic spork.
‘Can you help me?’ you ask, throwing your shoulders as near to the traffic as your bones allow.
Your question coincides with a particularly enthusiastic gust of wind blowing off the rubble-patch that was once the International Pool and which I wish, every time I wipe its gritty off-blow from my eye, still was. It also coincides with a particularly awkward-shaped mouthful of smoked tofu.
‘Can you help me get home?’
I want to tell you that there is International Pool graveyard grit in your beard.
I want to ask you where your home is and why you decided to pause and reverse your journey away from it on this flimsy pedestrian bridge that hardly anyone uses and we both know why; our ears are flooded with the racket of people moving, moving, moving.
I want you to know that there was a time when I would have sat down beside you and stayed there until the fear got too much. But I am an adult now, and this is Reality.
‘No.’
Some nights, as I am rushing towards the cardboardy comfort of my Ikea bed, I see you; you are still here, still at the roaring edge, the second to last person I will see today, and I smile at the gap in the railings to the left of your head, knowing that your question is no question, that you know something I may well never learn: how to be still.
Leeds in the Loop 