London, England, somewhere between King’s Cross Saint Pancras and Euston Underground Station

Will I ever stop feeling like this, Lucy wondered. When will it go away, will it ever go away, this intensity of sensation, this perfect balance between wonderment and pain, this sense of uniqueness. How many years does it take to dull the flames of the feeling of being so alive. She must have felt it too, once, that woman opposite me, with the exhausted eyes and the red bra strap peering out from under her sensible suit. Or that man with the takeaway McDonalds and the ripped jeans, does he realize. Do they know that we’re walking on the faces of angels, that we’re made of stardust and our bodies are temples for our souls, sheaths of skin and bone which each house a tiny fragment of the breath of G-d. The train thundered on into the darkness, the carriage swaying from side to side. Has every thought that we’ll ever think already been thought before, she wondered, eyes flickering, half seeing, over adverts for match dot com, Great Western holidays, a teenager faces execution for being gay will you send a text. Squashed between a businessman and a tramp, Lucy sat, silent, as she saw her life slowly roll out before her like a reel of film, watched herself getting older in snapshots with the same background of the blue and red seat and black windows of the tube carriage, saw wrinkles creep like spiders’ webs across her forehead and into the corners of her eyes, her hair morphing into the tackiness of badly bottled color. It was terrifying and yet simultaneously unreal; aging was a practical joke played by life on others, it didn’t apply to her. The moon rolled around the earth and the earth spun round the sun and plants lurched towards the light and Lucy Hughes sat on a tube carriage dreaming of transcendence; with each second that brought her closer to death she sat and dreamed, dreamed and dreamed until she could almost see the red and purple hills that in her mind were what the afterlife would look like. ‘Eternity’ and ‘heaven’ are words that become blasé when bandied back and forth over a Starbucks cup, but sometimes we need them to hold onto, she decided, bright little beads strung together in a taut and gleaming sentence. Leaving the tube, she looked up at the sky and was struck by how enormous it was, wide and huge and grey, heavy fertile clouds pouring forth a baptism of raindrops onto her hair, her cheeks, tiny glittering diamonds for her eyelashes. When the rain stops, she decided, it will hit me all over again, how clean the air smells, the water glistening on the leaves, the pinked clouds pierced by a double rainbow. She closed her eyes in anticipation of the promised ecstasy, only to open them with a start; stepping rapidly backwards, she only narrowly avoided the onslaught of angrily hooting bus.