I had no desire to cook that autumn. I thought moving out of London would encourage me to start looking after myself in that way again, but I turned out not to be cut out for it. Either for looking after myself, or for living away from London. 

I started trying different restaurants in the new town where I worked. When I couldn’t concentrate on documents I walked through unknown streets and entered cheap establishments where I thought I could be most alone. I encountered the same kinds of women sitting on neighbouring tables: women with big coats and headphones, women whose bright fingernails and grey complexions did not match. I ate beans and spinach. I ate chicken with brown rice. One night I was eating a Greek salad and a man came over to my table and said ‘Are you…?’ Minutes later, a woman also with long hair and wearing her best lipstick stepped in an uncertain manner through the door. 

It was strange to have so much free time. The mornings were so dark and still and quiet I began craving the fox-calls and the echoes of the bus again. I had been with someone and I left them: I was undecided if I would go back. My new life had more silence in it, but in many other ways it stayed the same. I still woke every morning with a thud of panic in my chest. I still walked into shops where the lighting was too harsh and left with oddly patterned clothes. 

I wanted to eat something very simple, but everything I ordered came with layers of salt and oil and garlic. Anything too strongly flavoured would repulse me, yet I accepted these performances of heat and texture all the same. My salary was decent, but I wasn’t capable of leaving plates unfinished. Once I sent a chilli back to a kitchen because I found the taste of cumin in it overpowering, and I had to give myself a pep talk in the bathroom afterwards. It was fine to reject things. I did not have to accept everything put before me, just because it happened to be there. 

I came across the vegetarian restaurant by accident, thinking it was where I needed to collect a parcel. You want two doors down, said a man wearing a wool cap standing just inside the entrance. In his hands he held a tray with a bowl of plain green soup on it. The bowl wasn’t too large, and the soup wasn’t too thick. I made a note of the place, and stepped back out onto the street. 

I both liked and distrusted working so much from my new apartment. At times when I was meant to be revising papers I would stare down through the windows to the square which hardly anyone walked through all day. I didn’t turn the lamps on as the sun began to fade early in the afternoon. I liked how the light became uniquely concentrated in my laptop, allowing me to block out thoughts of other things. 

I was developing the habit of solitude. At the weekend I would stay in bed until the urges of my body became too strong to ignore. I watched snow thicken on the pavements. My life was narrowing and shrinking, and this didn’t feel like something bad or untoward. 

I went to try to find the green soup on a regular weekday. Breaking my usual pattern, I left the flat at lunchtime, rather than at dusk, when it was already half-dark and I could melt into the streets unseen. That day there was only yellow, brown or orange soup on offer. The menu differed on a daily basis, explained the man still wearing the wool cap who now introduced himself as the owner. You’re not from here, he said, regarding me more closely. There wasn’t anywhere to sit – the place was popular with local workers. I took my cup of yellow soup outside and ate it on a bench with the scarf around my neck wound tight. 

When I lived in London, the person that I lived with liked to put on dinners very often. I had to make small talk, and I am not a skilled small talker. At first, I welcomed absenting myself behind complicated meals and dishes, using the excuse of preparation. Then I started wishing I could throw these heaving trays of protein – the people that we knew mainly wanted to eat protein – out of the window, or on the floor.

The soup that I was eating now was made from white leeks and potatoes, and it smelt like something sour someone had coughed up. Strangely, this did not displease me. I ate it all with satisfaction, relishing its lack of seasoning and how the vegetables had not been over-boiled. 

I became a regular customer at the restaurant. I went so often that the owner learnt my orders and my preferences – nothing with milk or cream or extra condiments, no bread on the side. I learnt to turn up either late or very early in the service so I could be seated. Sometimes I dined unaccompanied, but more often I brought work or a book that I was trying to begin or finish. Such an intellectual, said the owner. Reading while you eat. 

It felt like we would never make it through the winter. Usually I liked the season – how it could make everything feel sharper, much more urgent and acute – but here everything felt muffled and unclear. The city was beautiful but artificial, like a stage set, and the streets felt much too narrow for the largeness of my thoughts. 

One week the boiler broke in my new flat. It stopped working on a Friday afternoon and when I rang the water people, I was told the earliest that someone could come out was after the weekend. I dressed in several layers and a padded coat and folded myself into bed. I slept better than I had in months. I dreamt of rivers, a museum I’d once visited in Normandy, and a friend in a light-flooded room, taking both my hands. 

I’d never visited the restaurant at the weekend. When I arrived, I was one of two customers and only one waiter was working. The owner, who was there too, greeted me by name, though I did not yet know his. He was playing music in a language that I did not speak and offered me a salad and a slice of cake I knew I would refuse. I told him that I had no heating. He said he knew a local bar with fireplaces. Would I like to go with him later that evening?  I wanted to know his name. He typed it into my phone. 

Only once so far that winter I’d felt lonely. I decided I should take myself to have some kind of cultural experience, but because I was so late and on my own, I was seated in a vacant chair right on the front row. I had not realised the performance would be of an interactive nature, and I spent the whole night looking at my folded hands, trying so hard to avoid being addressed by the performer that I had neck strain for days. 

The bar was very warm but dark, and had bicycles as decorations hanging from its walls. The owner of the restaurant ordered us two beers. I had not taken alcohol in many months, and my lips stung from the bitterness. I asked the boy behind the bar for a glass of water, too. 

The owner spoke about his studies. He spoke about the line of work he’d left to open a café. He told me how he’d moved from his home city last September to gain more independence from his family. As he became more animated, he removed his low wool cap, under which I saw now he was balding. Any attraction that I felt towards him vanished. I tried not to blame myself – maybe it was evolutionary. The men in my family still had all their hair. 

I left it a week before I returned to the restaurant. It felt like a sign of grace that the owner wasn’t there. Instead, a younger girl with multiple ear piercings noted down my order. I recommend the beetroot, if you haven’t tried it already, she said. Her cheerfulness convinced me to say yes, and a man wearing a black hoodie brought me out a bowl of steaming purple liquid, garnished with sour cream. 

This man – he must have been the cook that day – was sombre and compact. There was something definite about him, like he’d settled into his eventual form from a young age. Where his sleeves had been pushed up, I saw things written on his body.  The word ‘Mercy’ and a woman’s name. His was Giorgi, he told me. 

I could not finish the soup that day. Maybe it was the sour cream, or maybe I was just distracted by the book that I was reading, about an artist married to a film director who had made one film herself after a lifetime of being underestimated or ignored. At fifty, two years after she had made the film with very little funding, she had developed an aggressive breast cancer and died. You didn’t like it, said Giorgi, looking at my half-full bowl, coming back to clear my table. No, I said, which was only a half-lie.  

We found each other quickly on the network everybody used. His image was an image of him staring out towards a beachfront, his back facing the camera. I sent him a link, pirated, to the film mentioned in my book. He’d commented on its cover; said it looked vaguely familiar. 

A few days later he asked me if I wanted to go see some music with him over the weekend. He included some potential times and venues in the message. I was free for all of them. I was worried that he might perceive, through the messaging platform, just how free I was, so I waited until the next morning to write back that I could make only the third performance on his list.

That night I shaped my eyes with pencil and dressed in a tight jacket that was more suited to spring. I prepared myself a meal of lentils, pickled vegetables and olives that I covered with green herbs. In setting it down at my table I rediscovered my desire to eat alone. 

Giorgi texted me an hour before we were meant to meet saying he was already at the venue. He had wanted to attend the second band’s performance. They’re amazing, he wrote to me. Get down here sooner if you can. I had decided to walk, though the rain all day had been extremely heavy. Maybe I had wanted to erode myself, to begin things in a state of minor ruin. 

When I got to the right place, it was practically empty. I located Giorgi easily, sitting at a table near the back, sipping on a beer. We greeted one another and I immediately noted the branding of his jeans, the branding of his heavy-soled black boots. The person that I left in London had avoided labels. He had worked for a period as a musician, and said that extra words and signs and symbols affected his performances. 

Before the next act came on Giorgi asked if he could get me a drink. He went up to the bar to purchase me a gin and tonic and in his absence a man and a woman wearing their best Saturday clothes came up to the table and asked if anyone was sitting there. Sort of, yes, I said.  Giorgi came back with a small glass garnished with lemon and said he had to go to the bathroom. I said I had to go to the bathroom too, where I tipped the contents of my drink into the sink. I returned to the bar quickly and asked the woman standing behind it if she could refill it with plain water.  Are you in any trouble, honey? she said. 

Giorgi was a good dancer. A woman out for the evening by herself – a schoolteacher, she told us – commented on this, and tried to move closer to him as the music became louder, and more insistent that night. Giorgi reached for my hand and shouted in my ear that he was amazed by people who knew all the words to songs. I don’t know all the words, I said. Most of them, he said. Then he said he wanted to go out for a cigarette and I followed him, his hands on my shoulders, as he steered me through the crush of people. Outside, where my hands were white from cold, it felt so good to smoke, to fill my body with something other than air. 

After finishing our cigarettes, we decided not to go back to the venue. It was a relief to be walking out into the evening, in the direction of my place. On the street we moved differently together. We weren’t now touching like we had been in the bar, though I knew we would again. I could feel an agreement. In the rain sheeting down onto the pavements and in the way Giorgi opened his chest up to it. The separation of his shoulder blades as he walked down the road. The weight of his hands as they trailed out of his jacket pockets. Mid-way on the walk we passed a late-night food place. Giorgi shook his head. Why would people want to eat such trash, he said, in the middle of the night. 

He left my flat at dawn as the light began to weakly press against my curtains. The light was so blue, that morning, I imagined I could swallow it, like water. Giorgi rose from bed, making sure he had left nothing on the bedside table, by my desk, or on the floor. 

I expected him to ask me out again, but when I heard nothing from him for a week I wondered what I was expecting at all. He no longer responded to the little flares of self-regard I put out onto the network, even though he was online.  He was absent from the kitchen when I went back to the restaurant at the weekend, and I began to think he was avoiding me. The only person there was the owner, who greeted me with warmth and offered me a coffee. As I drank it outside on the little pavement area the owner came out too, and said that he was going on a day trip over the next long weekend, to see the sea and eat good food. I should come, he said.    

I returned to London for a work trip. Between meetings in office rooms, I rode the bus and walked through former neighbourhoods. One afternoon, I ambled through a street market, stopping to inspect a stall covered in ornate, colourful jewellery. The older woman operating it saw me studying a black jet beaded necklace and suggested that I try it on.  It didn’t suit me, but when I said words to this effect the older woman disagreed and said that she would like to give it to me free of charge. I felt that I could not decline her offer and so walked away with an ugly necklace in my pocket I would never wear. 

I took the train back late the following afternoon. In my carriage was a former classmate of mine from university.   He didn’t recognise me, or pretended that he didn’t.

I’d received a text message finally from Giorgi the previous night, when I had given up all hope of hearing from him. He had asked me if I’d like to get a drink that week, and I’d said yes. We continued to write to each other all throughout the journey and agreed to meet at a bar in town later that night when I got back. Around the half-way point, my phone flashed with a call incoming from the owner. I didn’t answer it – the train was passing in and out of tunnels, and I thought that he was calling to invite me out that evening, when I already had plans. 

Not long after that attempted call he also sent me a text message. It was long. I read it as I walked unevenly to the toilets at the end of the aisle.   

I’ve found out recently that you’ve also been in contact with my cousin, and he suggested that you didn’t seem aware that we were already seeing one another when you went out to the bar the other night. That really disappointed me.  I need to be honest: this behaviour crosses a line. I can’t accept such disrespect and lack of honesty. It’s disappointing, and I no longer want to be in contact. I think it’s best that we don’t see or talk to each other anymore. 

The train slowed to a stop, and an automated voice blared through tinny speakers. This train is being held at a red signal, and should be moving shortly. Then another non-automated voice announced that if we were delayed by longer than an hour, everyone on board would be entitled to claim compensation. I texted Giorgi, to say that I was running late. I would keep him updated, I said, but when we pulled into the town a few hours later he still had not replied.   

The two men had not looked anything alike. They had never been in the restaurant at the same time I had visited it.  These were my defences as to why I had not known they were related, yet I knew that they were flimsy. I had not asked either of them many questions. I had been more interested in the version of myself that they allowed.  

I started taking a new shortcut through the town. The winter eased; I couldn’t feel the wind on my skin in the same way as before. I assembled salads with ingredients from markets that I had to take the bus to.  I didn’t go back to the restaurant. Sometimes I would think of Giorgi. Sometimes I would order things online that I did not need so that I could pick up parcels down the street from where he worked. I thought about what I would wear each time, wondering if he’d be taking his smoke break outside at the exact moment I walked past. One time he was, his apron slung over his arm. I ducked into the parcel-collection point, surprised. I think he saw me, but his expression was so static, so unchanged by the potential sight of my presence, that I collected my boxes and held them over my face as I walked back out onto the street. I had folded a large plastic bag into my backpack for the purpose of transporting them back home, but I walked with the packages the whole way like that, a wavering arrangement. I opened my front door, and the fragile tower I had held upright for the duration of the walk collapsed onto the floor in front of me. There was a smash – the sound of some utensil I had ordered breaking. It had not been very expensive. I knew that I would not send it back to be replaced.

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Alice will be reading alongside Tim MacGabhann, Ben Libman and Joanna Walsh at minor impromptu on Tuesday March 31st. More details can be found here.

Alice Blackhurst is a writer, critic, and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image (2021), short-listed for the R. Gapper Book Prize.  Her essays and criticism have been published in The Paris Review Daily, The Observer, The Guardian, The New Left Review, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement and Art Review. In 2024 she published the foreword to My Cinema, an anthology of Marguerite Duras’s film writings translated by Another Gaze Editions.