It’s actually mad how many names of locations here in london are the same as the ones I’ve familiarized myself with in new york.

It was mad when I walked from the hotel to the venue back in Sydney and there was a Hyde Park
I knew there was another hyde park, in the uk, in England, in London
The one I’m moving to tomorrow, a hostel right by hyde park, a “grim but central” area I’ve been told
The hyde park I’ve booked a swim session in for Tuesday, morning session 10-1:30, it’s hotter in London that I thought it would be and the booking was cheaper than I’d feared

It was mad when a friend of mine, older and wiser but dumber and more reckless, said to me when we arrived in Manchester a while ago, “these houses remind me of new york. But of course they are actually English. I never thought of that” and I had not even thought to think of that, and he was right, and then I went to new york for a long while and thought for the first week how the town houses looked British until they became American again, until they were the peak new york town houses I’d seen in Girls and Sex and the City, the ones that to me had always been new york and new york only until my grown up companion made that casual remark in a cab in Manchester

And now we’re all here, we’ve moved to New York
We’ve found a nice little rental near a sweet little school
Now I’m looking at houses with four or five floors
And you’ve found us a brownstone, said, -‘

A brownstone, that’s the word
The houses here are houses with two or three or four floors, the stones that are them are brown
And I’m in London now, here to walk the brownstone streets and to see the west end theatres,
Im a west end girl now
Confused as fuck by architecture and colonialism
It’s staring me in the face, from every corner of every building here in the residential area of hackney or Clapton or whichever it is,

And the names of the street
Are titles to songs

And the names of the areas
are titles to albums

And the names of neighborhoods
are also the names of neighborhoods in new york

I didn’t know there was another Greenwich

But I’ve always known about the international date line, it cuts through Greenwich, ive always been really proud to remember that fact because it gave me a sense of absolution,
this is where somebody decided for time to begin
And though, bitterly obvious now, it was made to start in a british territory, in the artificially established geographical point to where Japan would become
“the far east”,

I guess I never linked the two,
the Greenwich and the Greenwich Village in west Manhattan,
and I don’t think I even knew the date-greenwich was IN London,
I thought;
surely,
a small town somewhere,
in the English countryside, a sort of geological wonder, maybe a magnetic pole with any, just any sort of natural force to justify why this is where time would begin and end,

But it’s in London,
Its in a planetarium, made by people hired by people who dared to establish such a thing in the middle of their office which im sure must be similar to the oval one across the sea, their cousins of violence in another white house, contaminated by whatever name the virus must be called.

I’ll be going there today,
to Greenwich, not the one by the rehearsal space for the opera I used to work on, not the Greenwich village with rosetta pizza and the whitney museum with free admittance some fridays,
but Greenwich, the London area, following my fathers recommendation, im sure its really nice, im sure my father clocked these connections decades ago,

Im actually now sure that’s the reason the new yorkers don’t call it Greenwich village but “the village” and “east village”,
I assume theyre removing themselves from everything Britain,

Just like everything Britain is removing itself from everyone else,

Soon they’ll be islands lost in connections but securely fixed in time and geography, because once upon a time, their mutual ancestors decided that everything would begin 6,8 miles from the café im sat in on Chatsworth road, London, England, uk, Europe, central Europe, central, central, central.

is there such a thing as a big break?
is there such a time as time wasted?
is any care, thought, heart and blood ever poured into an irrelevant application ever lost?

where does it go?
where does my heart go?

If my heart, rejected by a boss in a office I’d love to one day be mine, is thrown out of her window, fallen down into the sidewalk, 3 floors down from the office I wasn’t allowed to interview in, not for this job and maybe not ever any,
say it survives the fall, my tired heart,
does it get up?
Does it cross the street, buy a cappuchino and take a second to sit?
Say my heart breathes in, breathes out, breathes in, looks up,
sees the boss in her window, standing there staring confused into the direction of my steadily calmer heart, does it wave at her?
Does it let her know it’s still around?
Let’s say my heart does a polite nod, let’s say it recognises the boss’ time and skill to select, though an obvious disagreement in this manner is on the table,
let’s say it nods and gets up,
goes for a stroll
away from me, the body across town,
the body accompanied by the mind still not in the know, the body and the mind happily wandering the blocks waiting for a decision to be made by somebody else, waiting for the e-mail.
My heart takes a different turn, finds itself looking at two dogs spotting one another, barking excitedly, my heart keeps going down the street and remembers a line from the application denied. There was something about arguing, and the dogs reminded my heart, there was a sentence somewhere worthy of reading again, at some point.
The heart forgets a minute later, and the mind wouldn’t know.
The two aren’t really connected, not since the application was sent, they haven’t seen a lot of each other lately.
My heart hasn’t spent much time with the body either, the body has been taking care of the body, the heart used to hang only with the mind.
Right now the mind is somewhere else, to the heart is doesn’t make a difference, because my heart knows that this one is for her.

It’s for my heart to bear,
to feel the weight of another rejection,
for her to pump the tears through the other, the body, into the eyes, of the body, all the way out into the world.
The body doesn’t do anything unless the heart says so, and for now the heart wants to keep this to herself.
My heart is solitary this evening, as she walks the streets of the neighbourhood she won’t be working in.
Did she ever really want to work here?
The mind isn’t here to tell her yes,
yes she did,
but my heart doesn’t need an answer.
My heart feels the imprint of opportunities lost, of ideas created, of possibilities potential to come around. It’s what the mind would tell my heart, but she doesn’t need to hear it. My heart watches a bus approach another bus on the same line, they are poorly timed in proximity to each other, my heart feels the annoyance of passengers waiting for that first bus that turned out to arrive not more than two seconds before the next, and the heart feels the relief of the passengers getting on either way.
My heart isn’t wondering, she knows how they’re feeling, she feels it and knows that what matters more than another rejection is arriving somewhere,
to a home or a hope,
to a previous stranger turned friend, to a certain corner of a park, to a decision to keep applying.
My wasted heart knows it’s exhausted, but attaches no meaning to the feeling, she feels and continues, until the moon disappears from her window later tonight. My heart will mostly feel sad, and then she will rest and reset, the sadness will remain until sunlight and through the early morning hours the sadness will have turned purple, transformed into a melancholy sense of frustration and hope, grief for another lost parallel life, hope for another moment of freely beating, the day after tomorrow my heart will be light, well rested, beating like before the e-mail.
It will be up to the mind to deal with the aftermath, of the strategizing and looking through open calls,
of fundraising
and deciding where to begin from scratch,
where to keep building and where to give up,
and the body will be soar from pilates and doing its best
to eat, sleep and kiss in the meantime,
to host the matter of two organs more heavily burned than the body itself,
the mind will have to carry a lot of weight in the upcoming weeks, and my heart knows this, so my heart will be feeling sad in order to feel warm, give warmth and to keep pumping oxygen and perspective through the body into the mind,
to each one’s own,
my heart has done its job because even though we didn’t get the job, a job was done and the job wouldn’t have been done without it, without her, my heart.

My heart decides that it is time to come home,
the heart comes home and finds the rest of me,
the moon is starting to rise and that means she will be sad for only half another night, into the sadness she goes, into the sadness and through.