Thirty (one) and Neither Flirty nor Thriving.

I'm thirty-one and orbiting the same few mistakes like they're landmarks. London is already awake before I am (or before I've slept) - sirens somewhere far enough to ignore, buses sighing at stops, people moving with purpose I can't quite borrow. I lie there for a bit, tasting last night at the back of my throat, trying to remember if I meant to drink that much or if it just...happened again.

The flat smells faintly of smoke and something stale. My tights are laddered, snagged on a life I don't seem to be careful with. I pull on them anyway. My eyeliner's still there from yesterday, just migrated - smudged into something softer, messier, like it gave up halfway through being intentional. I don't fix it. It feels more honest like this.

There's a message from a friend I haven't replied to. There are a few actually. I scroll past them with the same quiet guilt I carry around like a second phone in my pocket. It's not that I don't care - I care too much, maybe. Enough that answering feels like admitting I'm exactly where I said I wouldn't be.

Outside, London doesn't wait. It never does. People spill out of tube stations with direction, coffee cups clutched like purpose. I join them, but I'm not really going anywhere. Just moving so I don't have to think about the fact that I'm not.

I light a cigarette I told myself I wouldn't buy. The smoke curls up like it knows me, like it's familiar with this routine. There's a comfort in it I hate admitting - something steady in the inhale, the exhale, even if it's slowly wrecking me. At least it's doing something. That's more than I can say for most of my plans.

Plans. I used to have those, I think. Or at least I used to say I did. Now it's all vague gestures toward 'figuring things out' and 'taking it one day at a time,' which is just a softer way of saying I'm stuck. Stagnating. Like a puddle of rain that doesn't even get the dignity of rain to justify itself.

My bank balance is low enough that I check it like it might change out of pity. It doesn't. Numbers don't care about potential, about regret. They care about action, and I've been short on that lately.

I pass people that look like they belong somewhere - walking into offices, laughing into phones, carrying gym bags and tote bags and the invisible weight of knowing what comes next. I wonder if they ever feel like this. Like they've somehow missed a turning and now they're just drifting alongside everything instead of through it.

I tell myself I'll sort it out. Not today, maybe. But soon. Soon has become a kind of mythology I live in - this better version of me that wakes up earlier, drinks less, replies to texts, has goals written down somewhere real instead of floating just out of reach.

For now, I walk, I watch, I exist in the spaces between decisions, in the regret of doing it all again.

London keeps moving, loud and relentless and full of people that know exactly where they are going. And I'm here - thirty-one, a little lost, a little worn, still hoping that somehow, without quite knowing how, I'll find a way to move on with it instead of just being carried along.

I wrote a few years ago that I felt like a hamster on a wheel and refused to stay on it, and yet here I am, still running, still spinning, still stagnant.