after the ball is over

I take my leave, offering a genuinely thumping headache as the excuse, when in reality I suddenly and desperately want to be away and alone; slide myself into the back of a leather-seated Italian taxi (in Kent?), and relax into my immediate future: home, the sofa, a cold beer.

The driver doesn't talk to me, thank goodness. We slip along in the twilight through Sidcup and the back streets of Welling towards my house - streets I have never seen, whole worlds I have never visited before, only moments away from the one I have been living in all this time. All of those people. What are their lives like?

I think about all the little worlds running alongside mine, occasionally overlapping - circus performers, dancers, printmakers, writers, teachers, friends. Millions of little worlds.