Latest Blog Post

■ fresh start □

---

The sight of his empty bedroom was a bittersweet one. Stripped of all his belongings—his rubbish, as Ezra called it—it looked like the skeleton of a life he didn’t particularly like. Burnt spots marred the wooden floor where joints had slipped from his fingers, too high to hold onto them. The walls were grimy, and the remnants of every drug he’d tried lingered in the corners of every piece of furniture: at the back of a drawer, under the bed, behind the desk, at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room stood as a silent witness to the story of an addict, yet no one said a word.

They didn’t, because they knew that story would follow him wherever he went.

Instead, they pretended. They pretended Kilian was finally chasing a brighter future, even though they all knew he was moving to New York for all the wrong reasons. Both Ezra and Jenn believed he was meant to be a musician, but Kilian had applied for—and gotten—a job as a 911 dispatcher instead. The point wasn’t the job. The point was leaving London behind: forgetting the city that had killed his mother, then his father, and had kicked him while he was down time and time again. The point was dragging Jenn away from a country where he saw nothing but danger for her.

The point was starting fresh in the city he’d been born in but never truly had the chance to call home. To see what he could become there.

"You gonna be a'right on your own?" he asked Ezra as they stood at the door. The seventeen-year-old scoffed and shook his head.

"In this massive apartment with no mortgage or rent, and now a spare room to let at an extortionate price to some poor sod? Not to mention the blissful relief of not having to listen to you whinge. I’ll be just fine." But the grin on his face did little to disguise the truth: he would miss his brother, earnestly and deeply.

And Kilian would miss him too. But he was certain he wouldn’t miss the city itself.

---