Looking for calm: friendship, addiction, the riots, suicide, and where to nap

It was very busy outside but opening the map I used my finger to find a calm place on the northeastern part of the Northern Line. Gathering up my friends and energy, or sometimes alone, it was always like walking through a rural snowstorm at night to arrive at his blue door. The cracks in the sidewalk on the way broke legs and hearts and the weeds were confusing as they poked through the snow and obfuscated the cement stairwell. Walking up we could hear the furniture falling down the bin chute, one smashed light bulb and splintering chair leg at a time.

One afternoon I brought a mistake over. He was cloudy and smelled like the inside of an old car filled with banana peels left in the sun, and he made the cat hide under the bathtub. He swirled in the corner of the room, glaring and lurking alone, until the wind blew him out and the cat relaxed. Still, I brought him over again.

This time he was wearing a doctor’s coat. There was a sickness inside the calm room behind the blue door and I wanted to bring the temperature down. The doctor had a handbag full of new treatments and we discussed them at length in secret, once by the windowsill and once behind the sofa. At the window the topic was knowledge and how we would know if the medicine had worked. Behind the sofa we didn’t care, because the sickness was stubborn and reckless and the solution needed a precise dose of the same. So beneath the cushions we measured and poured and stirred, the fumes mixing with the sickness in the air to produce a chemically sweet smell. It was like a meadow that had an edge to it slightly reeking of an industrial fire, but it was better than the sickness. We delved into the handbag all night, laughing and sleeping and hiding, thinking it was home.

In the morning the snow outside was so cold and we had run out of money for the doctor. I wore the same white sweater that I had slept in and stopped in every off license to ask politely for something warmer. The grey weather was muted, too, but the memories from the doctor and the sofa compensated for the lack of sun and shopkeeper generosity, and it seemed our windowsill musings had correctly predicted the sickness was cured. Then there were his 6am phone calls. The hallway behind the blue door had filled with old pizza boxes, cat litter, magazine clippings and confusion. The walls were awash with the inside of our head.s And it had spilled into the streets. The doctor had taken off his coat and his toxic smoke filled alleyways and burned stores with children and parents igniting the gas tanks of police cars. The meadow was false and the industrial fire loomed over the city, texts unanswered.

I ran back to the blue door to find calm. The snow was gone and a police army with ray guns and enormous muscles were rampant in the sidewalks. I pounded on the door and no one answered. Still, the fires burned outside, so I left everything behind to search for serenity. Every time a peaceful word was uttered, it was smothered by the convention of chaos. Police lined up on top of the buildings and the cat made their arms bleed when they tried to save him. Then it stopped. The news crews arrived with expensive cameras that magnified the damage for the world and stiletto heels that crushed the evidence. I screamed and screamed at them to go home because the blue door wouldn’t open, and when it did, all that came out were shells and casualties of the sickness; high-heeled feet could never support a mouth that would understand its past. I left the reporters to nap on the lap of the homeless man outside the tube stop on the Northern line, dreaming of different coloured doors.