I get home from work at seven o’clock and I call him, even though I haven’t called him in at least four years and probably shouldn’t, now that he’s gotten back from Japan with who I can only guess is his new girlfriend, if Instagram is anything to go by. I feel a sense of urgency about calling him, the kind of urgency I can’t explain because I know that he won’t pick up and even if he did pick up, it would start with reminiscing and end in a shouting match and then another four year gap between contact. Maybe we’d run into each other somewhere incredibly inconvenient, but it’s been a while since we’ve lived on the same street and now I live in Brockley and he lives in Finsbury Park so there’s no real risk of that either. I sit in my flat and stare at my phone and try to weigh up the risks of calling, weigh up my own exhaustion with life, weigh up how much I want to meddle in what is very much not my own business. I put my phone down and take off my clothes because I know that if I sit down I won’t shower this evening and I can’t go to work tomorrow with greasy hair, so it’s showering now or showering not at all.

I want to call him because I saw Fred Wilkes, just randomly on the District line, and he is the only person who will understand the private significance of this event, the only person who has bridged that vast gulf of time between who I was and who I am going to be, and so is entirely necessary to contact him in this moment about the sighting of Fred Wilkes. I stare at myself in the mirror, the bags under my eyes essential to blending in with the thousands of other people who are precisely like myself, but also are not, because they are not me. I wonder if this is how Fred Wilkes saw my face, when we were standing together there on the platform, at the tail end of the commuting hour, both of us probably hoping to beat the rush to the Jubilee line but ultimately unsuccessful. Maybe Fred Wilkes is actually the only person on this planet who really understands me, understands the way that aspiration sours into complacent familiarity until the world assumes a monotony you can’t even break out of by dreaming because this was supposed to be your dream. I certainly hope this not to be the case, though, because Fred Wilkes has only ever been the subject of ridicule and morbid fascination, at least in the past life I once lived up in Manchester.

I turn on the shower, testing the warmth of the water with my hand before stepping under the spray. The water could be hotter but I don’t care anymore, I can’t be bothered to call up my landlord to call up someone else to figure out what has been wrong with my boiler for months, so I stand in the lukewarm spray and think about how I should call him and tell him that I saw Fred Wilkes. If he picked up, I think, he’d talk to me, fall into the old habit of making fun of Fred Wilkes’s student room username–DrFredWilkes, a name which seems normal now that he’s on a PhD programme at Oxford but was boastfully aspirational when he made the account as a sixteen year old–and maybe life would resume some sort of old pattern, and I’d be able to dream again. I remember once, after we broke up, I went to a house party in Fallowfield in Manchester and met people who had met Fred Wilkes and therefore could tell me the horror stories of the way he’d file noise complaints against them or send mail to their own parents ratting them out for using ketamine at a party. It made me feel connected to him again, somehow, talking to strangers about our shared private celebrity, even if we never talked anymore.

When I first saw Fred Wilkes on the district line platform I didn’t even know if it was him, I couldn’t tell for sure because I had never actually met Fred Wilkes before, had never seen him in person, only assembled him as a collection of forum posts and bad youtube videos and complaints threads in my head. So, Fred Wilkes was more of a conceptual idea than a real person in my head up until that point, but I wanted so badly for this random man to be Fred Wilkes himself for reasons that I am still confused about. I saw him on the platform, couldn’t stop staring, and so he started staring back until it was just me and probably-Fred-Wilkes staring at each other on our commute home from work. I knew he was watching me when I got on the train, not because he knew me (seeing as we had never met), but because I was probably some strange woman commuting home from work staring at him, so I opened the pirated Twilight PDF on my phone I had been slowly working through during my commutes just to see how he’d react. He shuffled to the other side of the carriage, staring out of the window into the chthonic tunnels of the underground system but really back at me because when you’re out of the sunlight the tube windows become as good as a mirror for that sort of thing.

I almost texted him there and then, that I had seen Fred Wilkes, someone who we had only known in the context of Manchester and who was supposed to be in Oxford and yet was somehow here in London doing something as mundane as getting on the underground, and I was supposed to process this as a completely normal thing because only psychos care about people they’ve stalked on studentroom and the way people they used to know would react to this information. I was thwarted, though, because there was no cell service in that part of the underground and anyway I didn’t want possibly-Fred-Wilkes to see that I was texting someone else about him, so I sat down in the empty seat next to where he was standing and stared back into space at our mirror-selves. It felt nearly cinematic in a way that I rarely let myself indulge in anymore. I leaned my head against the pane of glass that separated us, wondering what would happen if I said anything, where it would lead me, what I would learn that I couldn’t determine online. I wondered if London was treating Fred Wilkes well, if he still had a weird fixation on classic cars entirely induced by too many afternoons in the Wirral watching top gear, if he remembered making painful imitations of Tom Scott vlogs, if he still felt an inadequacy about being rejected from Cambridge as an undergraduate.

I get out of the shower and sit in my bed, too exhausted to process anything except my reflection in my wardrobe mirror and the insecurities that are always present in my mind even when I pretend that they are not. Maybe I want to call him not because I miss him or because I’m obsessed with Fred Wilkes but rather that I miss the pattern of dreaming that my life used to take up, the wonder I used to feel toward that alien landscape that was London, the latent possibility I felt whenever I’d visit the city as a tourist. Now the gaps have filled in and all I am stuck with are my own life choices but now I don’t even have the option of dreaming, something Fred Wilkes can at least claim to hold and to have. So I sit on my bed and I stare at my phone but I don’t call him about Fred Wilkes, I don’t breach that pane of glass in the end, because I know that there’s no use for it anymore, that I’m no longer that girl and I won’t ever be again.