katherine and lauren - day 6
katherine and lauren - day 6
by Rosie Coleman Collier
katherine and lauren - day 6
Breakfast: I’m served a knot in my tummy when I wake up this morning. I’m playing football at 11:45 and haven’t played in ages. I make a coffee and do some emails, and after an hour at my desk make porridge, topped with bananas, raspberries, blueberries and a final sprinkle of the remains of my chia seeds. I get changed, scraping my hair into a high ponytail with a plait.
I see on Katherine’s BeReal you’re on a bus in Hackney, Lauren up early in bed with tulips on the table; writing to you both as you negotiate the city that you share, living in the same area, going to the same parks, pubs and supermarkets but haven’t yet been introduced. Lauren is one of my relatively new friends, who I met at a house party on an evening when I was feeling hypersensitive of my boyfriend at the time’s coldness towards me and cried in the toilets getting my mascara stains on her white t-shirt. I immediately knew she was kind. Katherine one of my oldest, whose first memory I have is of us at eight years old when she stole a single sweet from the pick and mix at Jesmond Village Store and had to get me to return with her the next day after school to leave a single penny on the counter, to clear her conscience.
I’m missing London today, something I never thought I would feel when I moved away at the end of the August. I tell Lauren this via a text message and she tells me it’s a grey and miserable day there, which feels strange when the skies are so blue and bright where I am. She says she is off to buy some overpriced bread. I’m thinking about ways I can come down for Katherine’s birthday in Spring.
I’m early to football so get off the bus before my usual stop to buy a coffee (cappuccino with oat milk) and a cardamon and lemon roll, from a bakery that has all the pastries lined up in the window it entices you in. I walk through Queens Park rather than walking down the road outside the park like I normally do. When I get to the pitch, I decide to eat the pastry, nervous in case this will give me a stitch but encouraged by the others who are also eating. As we warm up my nerves for playing dissipate, I feel an ease with the ball.
Lunch: A simple café post match, a lorne square sausage and fried onions with ketchup in one of those soft but simultaneously crispy bread rolls you can only get in Scotland. Lauren introduced me to this order when she stayed the night with me in early January; we went for one and I ended up eating two. The same again today. When Katherine next comes to visit this is a breakfast item I will pass on to her. I’m too hungry to pause and take a photo of the roll for this entry.
Home and I shower and decide to say no to my offers of evening plans. My body is tired, I need to catch up on the sleep I missed last week and start packing for moving house, I can feel myself needing time alone. Saying no is something Katherine and I both struggle with; I feel relieved in the fact it’s getting so much easier now. This comfortableness of being alone is shared with Lauren –an only child trait perhaps– we sometimes both express concerns of being almost too comfortable by ourselves. I’m not sure what you have both decided to do this evening.
Dinner: I go to Sainsbury to get something to eat, watch a film on Mubi and sleep early. To walk to Sainsburys I wear a weird arrangement of clothing: Adidas tracksuit bottoms, my Birkenstock clogs, a hat with fur on the top and a leather jacket, aware of how strange I look when the streets are filled with people looking normal going out on a Saturday night. I wonder if Lauren ever got the Birkenstock’s she wanted after she got back from Seville and remind myself to ask her. In the supermarket I purchase all the items I need for dinner, I only have the energy for something easy: Linda McCartney meatballs, tinned tomatoes and chillies for a pasta sauce, fresh tagliatelle, some broccoli, parmesan cheese. I decide I need cotton wool and some mini eggs too, so I put these in the basket when I get to the queue. When I get home, I realise the mini eggs are not in my tote bag, I must have left them on the check out.
Bio: Rosie (she/her) is a curator, researcher and editor from Newcastle upon Tyne currently based in Glasgow where she is doing an MLitt Curatorial Practice at GSA. Her work looks to facilitate contexts for exchange and collectivity, and is situated within practical and theoretical approaches towards care, labour, support, relations and intimacy.
Thanks! Kate + Sinae