A Fragment

Izzy Wales was thinking about what she did. She didn't know whether she liked it, and she didn't know whether it mean a thing. One day,
near the end of last September, she had met three other women lingering in a bar. Americans,
they said that they were theatre students, spending a term in London working for experience in the industry. They could write it in their resumes, they said, and later this would help them get a real job, one that paid. Izzy remembered, she hd said,
i guess that you must all really love the theatre. to be wanting to going into it as a career and they
had all said that they did and then had told her what they did all day send letters answer phone calls stare at screens make tea and izzy hadn't known how to respond. Later,
she had walked home in the rain. It was a Friday night, and everyone was pouring out onto the streets from all the bars and clubs, girls in short skirts, guys in t-shirts, getting rained out, fighting, shouting, laughing, crying, kissing and Izzy had walked past them all and passed another woman walking in the opposite direction by herself and didn't meet her eyes, she had looked like a lonely and strange girl and Izzy has remembered wondering, did she look like that herself to other people? Or even looked like anything at all? Often Izzy thought
she must have become invisible, days and weeks would go past when she wouldn't say a word to anyone because no-one would seem to see her, no-one that she didn't know already and she wouldn't want to talk to them because they would all seem in her head just like names, or even strings,
of letters, things that had no characters attached to them, or feeling, and
she would think about them and would wonder whether she should call them but she never would - they just always seemed so cold to her, inside her head, as if they would not could not understand something that she could not understand herself - as if the would not under that, either that, or her her - they were the same - and izzy didn't want that. And so she would just walk around the city, sometimes men would look at her, but she would never look back, or talk to her, but she would never talk back - just say either yes or no, or maybe sometimes facts, about herself, or what she did, mostly, and where she came from, and sometimes
she would let them fuck her if they asked her. If they asked her, was they way she thought about it, if they had the guts to ask her, then they had the right. But never
her place, only ever always where they lived, and never more than three or four times. After that if they tried calling her she just didn't answer. Once
she remembered,
she met someone in a bar. He was drinking by himself. And she had stared at him until he could no longer ignore it, and then walked up to him and asked him if she could buy
him a drink. They spent that night together, and after
he had come he had started crying, started trying to tell her all about
something, tell her why, but he just couldn't and he knew it but he didn't know the reason. And she had slept a couple more times after that and then had never seen him since.
Sometimes she wondered where he was. But mostly didn't think
of him at all. And she
wondered if he thought of her. She didn't know, she guessed, maybe the same way. It was strange - he wasn't th