Dear Harvey

Dear Harvey,

I just turned 25! It was a Sunday birthday, one with a lot of quiet moments and time for reflection and from that clarity I’ve decided there’s something I need to confess. December 2021, the 22nd specifically, we hung out without you. I don’t think it makes me evil necessarily but you can’t have secrets between friends and I think you should know.

We met just after lunch at the top end of Oxford Street, I hadn’t eaten yet because I’d only woken up half an hour before. We walked up and down the John Lewis as Will needed a Christmas Present for his mum that was in the thirty-to-fifty-pound range. He decided against a candle, some artisanal socks would do nicely but we didn’t look much.

Leaving, my phone got signal once again and rushed to let me know what I’d missed in that little Christmas wonderland. I’d been added to a WhatsApp group message, one started by your Mum, that included a Zoom invite to an imminent call. We took a pew in Cavendish Square Gardens facing my childhood dentist, bringing back an old ache. The data around Oxford Street is woeful, we all know that, so the three of us gathered around the one phone in my pink and shaking hand. CCTV had finally been obtained and watched, you’d been spotted last around the entrance to Heaven, the slice of it in Charing Cross. Funny that, we were meant to meet there the very next night. I suppose you couldn’t have waited a day longer. We walked that way making chit chat but we didn’t look much.

We left around 6, it was already pitch black and I didn’t think there was much I could do. I rode the Circle Line home and the news followed me there, finding me only a couple days later, but I think I’d already known in spite of my protestations.

Each time I walk under, over, through Embankment Station I feel a weight. Something akin to the static clinging of a poncho, an empty heaviness. The weight of absence I guess. Going along the Thames there is a moment when I remember I’m coming to what was probably the point of your last conscious moments. It’s a thought that has to be swallowed, dryly. Thames, Tamesas, Tamesis, the name stemmed from dark water and how cold and dark it must’ve been in late December. When I walk the Golden Jubilee Bridge I have to admit I don’t look down much.

The map of London is smattered with places like that, joys turned sour with time. Around school, Hither Green station, almost every pub in Soho. I haven’t been to your tree since it was planted, the memorial in Manor House Gardens. I will, though, come and just sit with you. I’m just so sorry you couldn’t be there that December day, I hate leaving you out of my plans.

Hope you’re alright now, I’d love to catch up.