The Girl on the Tube

It was circa 2014. 

I was a giddy law graduate having moved from Manchester to London. 

I was squandering my family's fortune by living a busy and extravagant life. I was never (ever) at home, except when I was caught up with bar school prep pulling all-nighters and such. 

I was out out, then awake in my study working through the night, then out out, then cross-examining my witnesses at school, then out out again. 

The word for it is "giddy". It was a giddy, fanciful life. It was not without adversities of course. Bar school was tough for an introvert like me. It didn't help that I had a tough, feline-like, straightforward and vicious advocacy tutor. Her words cut through feelings like a knife slicing through bread. Her name was Catherine. Catherine made my teammate cry once. She called my other teammate "the most self-conscious barrister she had ever met". 

I never quite gave in to Catherine's jabs for one of my strengths is the ability to hold in all emotions, although until today I live with the self-limiting belief that I am not particularly talented at cross-examination (quite unlike Johnny's Camille Vasquez thank you very much). I was always "well-prepared" however, which was Catherine's way of saying something nice when she had nothing else to say. 

I don't believe I was truly well-prepared, not with the lifestyle I led. Maybe if I was really well-prepared I'd actually have appeared talented. 

I studied with the best, with the OxBridge (Oxford, Cambridge) fellows with all the connections and all the past internships at the European Court of Justice all the way in Luxembourg. 

Look at me sounding all bitter about connections and power - it was my family's fortune that got me to where I am too, my family's hard-earned fortune. I really was a small town lass from a tiny oil town, with a history of roots in the Netherlands (believe it or not), where my family lived for a brief period amongst the Dutch looking to make money from oil too. Yet there I was studying with the best. One of my groupmates was a comedian, but he did his bachelors in Cambridge so you could only imagine what a talented breed he was at advocacy. He drew a crowd in at a snap of his fingers. 

I digress.

The point of this post is about the Girl on the Tube. 

One fine night in London, when I was returning home to my humble flat in Holborn, I chanced upon a girl on a tube. She was wearing a black and red tutu-like ensemble, almost certainly punk-rock inspired. She was of Asian descent. She looked to be in her early thirties and she looked like she was just getting off work. She looked like she belonged exactly where she was, in that tube, heading to her destination. Her mannerisms were nonchalant, almost like this was part of her daily routine. 

I wondered about her life, how she got to London, what she did for work, what led her here and how she made it. Her nonchalance was alluring, almost as though it took no effort at all for her to fit right in. Into London, this place I had romanticised and fantasised building a life in for (just) as long as I live. 

A part of me knew of course, that this giddy, fanciful life would in a year, come to an end. I was a foreigner, a small town lass, petite, with a soft-spoken high-pitched voice which projected as far as a paper plane. My only talent in law really was that I was "well-prepared". 

The imminence of a cut-off date made it easier to live fancifully. Only naturally, I wanted to experience all of London. I wanted to lick London like the edges of an envelope. It was mine for now before my envelope would be sent off. It was mine to hold, to caress and to enjoy, before I would need to leave to where I came from - a place I did not know too well at all by virtue of having left at a young age. 

Girl on the Tube got off the tube while I was still on the tube, never to be seen again. Even the way she got off the Tube was soul-stirring. She didn't need a map, she didn't need to double check which stop it was. She got off the tube in the way a person would get off every day of their life. With the click of her black boots, she was off, off to live her life as I was to live mine. 

I forgot all about her, as we do our dreams, when realities eventually impinge upon our fantasies.

I've been told a lot to get out of my head, to see that the grass is not actually greener. I've been told to wake up and forget the aspirations that come all too naturally, so naturally like it does one's intuition. I'm learning to forgive all my dream-breakers in this life because they are so jaded they felt the need to rain on my parade. 

In honesty, my jaded subconscious mind erased the Girl on the Tube from my memory. I had forgotten all about her.

Until recently.