Jemma Wayne

But quickly, firmly, I refused, more firmly than I had ever spoken to him.

But the sea sees nothing. It tells nothing. A dark, cold-hearted mass, spitting shadows onto the shore. Moving but silent – asleep. Oh yes, sparkling blue in the sunshine, pretending. Pretending pleasure, openness, freedom.

There are so many homeless people in LA that it is easy to grow desensitised, to stop noticing, or to perceive a ‘problem’ instead of a person.

to give her a wad of cash big enough to matter,

we expressly notice the people we’re supposed to bond

with, pick them inexplicably from a crowd; or if the reverse is true, if we force connections with the people who exert intangible magnetic vigour.

For a few years after university there were emails, but we never really said anything in them. There were sentences full of unasked questions, and gaps where truth should have been. I left him with memories only, to hold as he always had.

opened my laptop and set about to google him, but in the end I stopped myself. Instead, I grabbed my trainers, and my skateboard, and strode outside into the California air.

was in heaven for the domes, and the cobbled streets, and the weathered faces, and the beautiful, uniformed teenagers slinging rifles, and the feeling inside me that this was a place of urgency and passion and tragedy and conflict, and made me want to write

I know the value of protecting closed wounds.