I wasn’t myself in Januarys. In fact, I never felt that the year truly began until at least April, maybe May. But January was the worst month of all. It was a waste and a warping of time, I knew that, but I was so not myself in Januarys there was nothing I could do to alter things. Everything I applied myself to and everyone I came in contact with only got half of me, the other half replaced by a manic me, made frantic by hopefulness, soggy for spending too long trying to be languid in the summer heat while actually feeling wretchedly hungry for the Something Better the new year was hovering under my nose. I was biting at it, gnashing my teeth, tiring quickly, then feeling desolate because I was already resigned and it was not quite February.
So when I crossed paths with Alba one January, I was ill-prepared. Wait! I couldn’t say but wanted to. Can we reschedule this fortuitous meeting for another month? No, I couldn’t say that. I felt our crossing of paths had to be an act of inspired serendipity, and I couldn’t ask fate to wait. Fate doesn’t wait until you’re ready, I told my frantic self very seriously, trying to weigh her down with the threat of losing this serendipitous opportunity.
It was surely, I reasoned, a sign that the Something the new year was hovering under my nose was going to be good, and that even though I wasn’t myself, yet, if I would just let things happen, I might be shifted off my usual course of liminal January to April aimlessness.
–
Here’s what happened in the lead up to crossing paths with Alba that January: I had a dream about her. The dream was of us when we were teenagers at the beach house owned by her family, where we would spend our days getting sunburned and eating cheese and red onion sandwiches and watching things on TV like Thirteen and Skins, which at the time felt very expansive and rebellious by proxy.
It was a memory projected on the inside of my mind, like I was reliving a time I had lived once before: less a vague, dreamy sense of the heat of sand or the taste of cheese on buttered white bread and more a visceral scene of my life being replayed.
When I woke up from living one of those adolescent days for the second time, I wrote a poem about it, quickly on a scrap of paper. It was some scribbled lead pencil lines about nostalgia and summer heat and it was arguably terrible but I had to capture all that circulating energy.
As I scrawled, I felt magnetic. Nostalgia! Had I found the antidote to my new year malaise?
Had I been looking forward when all this time I should have been looking back?
–
Then: a week after the poem about the dream, twelve years after we’d last seen each other, three weeks into my January frazzle, I was at a café alone, sitting at a table on the pavement in the sun, when a figure walking by materialised into Alba.
We caught each other’s eye and our gazes settled and she stopped walking and I tilted my head. “No way,” I said. She walked towards me and said, “come here.”
I stood up and we hugged like it was the most natural thing in the world: to greet each other on a warm, January morning.
We both took a step back to look at the other properly. I felt very conscious of the way my face was aging and I was sure she was presently noticing the tiredness under my eyes and the way my jawline had begun to sag. She looked great. So great I almost hadn’t recognised her at first, but now that my eyes had adjusted to her current form she seemed so Alba as to almost be a caricature of Alba. Everything about her looked sunny. She looked like she hadn’t left that beach up the coast since we were sixteen.
We caught up swiftly, the dot points of our lives between then and now. She had been living in New York for a stint but now in fact lived around the corner from me and had done so for nearly a year. We commiserated that our paths hadn’t crossed until now.
She said she had to run to catch the bus so we agreed we’d be in touch to organise something and then off she went. I sat back down to finish my coffee. I looked up the street to where Alba had just been. I felt the magnetic stirrings of something at work.
What were the chances I would wake from a dream to write a poem about a long ago friend only for our paths to cross this way? Could my nostalgia have begun to jolt me out of my wretched state? Was it capable of reminding me of the Point Of It All which was… which was… what was it? It was Something! It was certainly something, not nothing. I could sense the outline of the Something and I was fumbling towards it.
–
When we were sixteen, on the walls of her attic bedroom, Alba had pasted up images of musicians who were now either old or had been dead for decades usually because of an overdose. I didn’t know half of them but I said they were cool.
They were too cool for me, was how I felt, their perfect youth, more youthful than my own youth, sexual and immortal in monochrome gloss.
She also had polaroids and scraps of paper with song lyrics stuck on the wall, and a quote to do with Edie Sedgwick. I didn’t know who Edie Sedgwick was either but I loved the quote enough to one day write it down quickly on my own scrap of paper. I put it in the top drawer of my desk to reference when I wanted to remind myself what it was to be dynamic and free instead of stagnant and bored. I was terrified of becoming stagnant and bored. My sixteen year old self could think of few worse fates. Most likely because it was such an ordinary and probable one. It was a threat worth staying ahead of except I didn’t know how to do that exactly. Perhaps that hyper-awareness of potential was the beginning of my error.
The quote was from a movie about Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. It was some dialogue between the two about how people might remember them after they were gone. It goes like this:
Andy: I wonder what they’ll say about you…in your obituary.
Edie: Nothing nice, I don’t think.
Andy: No no, come on. They’d say, Edith Minturn Sedgwick: beautiful artist and actress…
Edie: …and all-round loon.
Andy: Known for setting the world on fire…
Edie: …and escaping the clutches of her terrifying family…
Andy: …made friends with everybody and anybody…
Edie: …creating chaos and uproar wherever she went. Divorced as many times as she married, she leaves only good wishes behind. That’s nice, isn’t it?
The quote on Alba’s wall was a condensed version of the above, a cursive checklist of personality traits and wild behaviour to reference. All-round loon… known for setting the world on fire… escaping clutches… creating chaos and uproar wherever she went. It was the to-do list of a girl quite sure she was destined for a brilliant life.
–
A week after our chance encounter, on a sticky January day, Alba pulled up outside my house with a cigarette pressed between her lips.
“Get in, honey,” she called from the rolled down window of her car, the cigarette waving up and down. Thrilled, obliging, electric, I scuttled across the road towards her.
Once I slid into the passenger seat and closed the door, we looked at each other and grinned. “Well, hi,” I said.
“Hi to you,” she said, and she slipped the cigarette from between her lips to between her fingers. She turned the wheel and pulled out of her crooked park and off we drove.
The car smelled like cigarettes, but not in a heavy, dirty way. It smelled smoky and nostalgic. She spoke with her hands while she was driving, her fingers flicking up and down on the wheel, both hands in the air at times. I was surprised to observe her movements and inflections and to remember them so easily. She hadn’t changed at all and this made me realise how much this January and every month before had hollowed me out.
–
Her adolescent attic bedroom with the ephemeral bits on the walls had a window that looked out to the roof and across treetops. We used to climb through the window and sit on the roof and talk about all the things we dreamed of for our lives. Often on that rooftop we’d smoke cigarettes we’d stolen from her mother’s bag. So Alba had been addicted to nicotine since sixteen, the smokiness of her car and the cigarette between her fingers not merely a habit but a feature of her personality. Despite this chemical reliance, she looked like she had barely aged, her skin still dewy and golden, her eyes still bright and hungry.
On the other hand, I felt sure every drunk cigarette in which I’d occasionally partaken had sucked a little of my life force out of me, puff by puff.
–
At the cafe I’d directed us to, we found seats at a table in the sun. Alba held the menu in both hands and leaned over the table conspiratorially towards me.
“Mimosas?” She asked with wide eyes.
I widened mine in response and said, “mimosas, yes.”
I was meant to be doing dry January but I couldn’t adhere to that now. It was too boring a thing with which to reintroduce myself to Alba, and besides, I reasoned, it was nearly February.
We ordered two mimosas. We scanned the menus and as we did so Alba was saying, “yum, that sounds good, yes to that,” with her nail running down the options. She looked up at me and asked, “what do you feel like?”
I deflected, said, “I really don’t mind, you choose.”
Obviously I wanted to be the kind of person whose eyes grew wide with anticipation as they said, I want that, but I didn’t want to impose my desires. In fact, that January, I felt like I’d swallowed my own tastes and inclinations and couldn’t spit them back up without making a mess all over myself. I didn’t know what I wanted. What I wanted was for someone else to tell me what I wanted, even and especially for lunch.
Alba said, “ceviche, focaccia, burrata,” her voice lilting and hypnotic, the meal sounding like an ambrosial lullaby. “And whatever else you want,” she added.
I suggested the radicchio salad, too, feeling brightened that the task of choosing a communal meal had been completed and I no longer had to worry Alba was forming a judgment about who I was now based on my meal choices.
“Perfect,” she snapped the menu shut with a slap. I sat up straighter, trying to shake off my self-consciousness and manic January-ness and shift myself into a person of Fun and Substance.
She threw her hands up and said brightly, “so, you’re a success!”
I laughed in surprise. No, I wasn’t. She was the success, I insisted.
“Don’t be silly,” she shook her head, “what’s all this about? I’ve heard a little of what you’ve been up to over the years. You are a success!”
“I’ve done boring things like work a lot. Very dull,” I waved a hand to dismiss a decade of my life’s happenings.
What I was thinking was that she was the success because she was magnetic and did ridiculous things and attracted all kinds of outrageous people.
What I was thinking was that I was tired of the scale on which we had all been measuring success, which now seemed limp and lifeless, and that I wanted to leap off that scale altogether, as she had done from the start.
What I was thinking was that I didn’t want to talk about me, had completely forgotten what the point of me was, so I said, “tell me about you. Where have you been all this time?”
She allowed the deflection, told me about her time living in New York, and that she travelled a lot for work. Otherwise she’d been here, in Sydney. “On the bum-side of the earth,” she pulled a face.
The mimosas arrived, we ordered food.
–
That morning, when I’d woken from a nervous, broken sleep, I’d decided to say nothing about the dream or the poem, not wanting to ruin this fateful turn of events by being too intense. Intensity was a turnoff for people these days, I had noticed. But we’d ordered our food and Alba was taking a sip of mimosa, an elegant finger extended from the hand wrapped around the champagne flute, and my mouth was opening and I found myself wanting to offer something up to her, found myself saying out loud, “can I tell you something crazy?”
“Of course you can,” she said, with a hungry look. She put her glass down on the table and pulled out a cigarette from the packet in her shirt pocket. Like she was settling in for a really good story. Oh no, the pressure felt hot.
I briefly contemplated coming up with a different story to tell but could think of nothing so I spilled the words out of my mouth. “A week before we bumped into each other, I had a dream about you. About us, when we were teenagers, up the coast at the beach house. And I wrote a poem about it, about that summer.”
She looked thrilled, said, “well, now you have to show it to me.”
I was regretting leading myself to this particular moment but with no apparent option to undo things that are said and done, I said, “ok. But don’t judge too harshly, it’s very rough.”
I handed her my phone and she sat and read the poem quietly, then I watched her eyes scan back up to the top of the screen and read it for a second time.
When she was finished she looked up and said, “you have to send this to me.”
I said, “I’m slightly mortified.”
She shook her head energetically and said, “stop that. It’s nostalgia in a poem. It’s sunkissed nostalgia all wrapped up in a perfect little piece. It’s everything I love. You’re very good.”
I exhaled lightly. “Well. I’ll send it to you.” I took a deep sip of my mimosa and, desperate to move the conversations onwards and away, asked her how long she had been in New York.
“A couple of years,” she said. “I left nearly a year ago, because I thought I missed it here too much, but now I think I miss New York more than I missed here, so who knows where I’ll end up. Life is a perpetual state of missing something, isn’t it?”
Something! I nodded in agreement. Chasing something, missing something, hoping for something. “Definitely,” I said emphatically.
Our food arrived and there was a flurry of activity of making room on the table. Two more mimosas were ordered. I asked if she was seeing anyone.
“I’m off men,” she waved her hand, swatting the theoretical men away. “Since I left New York actually. I mean, I still go on dates, but I just leave if it’s not fun. God, I have some stories, you wouldn’t believe. The tipping point was a man who turned up to our date wearing a wooden bow tie on which the New York City skyline was engraved.” She started laughing, “I couldn’t look at anything but the bow tie the entire meal, it was shocking.”
I laughed too, at the image of the hapless man in his wooden bow tie sitting opposite the force that was Alba.
“But no,” she continued, suddenly serious. “Here, there, people are all a bit sad and they don’t even realise it. Don’t you think? Everyone is going from one thing to the next without really experiencing it as their life. Their actual life! I’m tired of it, of holding their hands.” She shrugged. “It depletes me.”
I waited for her to say more but she was looking at me with anticipation. I cleared my throat.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to say back. Post-April me would know just what to say. Post-April me would have her own insight into the vast nihilism of our generation, her own anecdotes of romantic interactions so depressing as to be hilarious. But for January me, all possible responses felt like I would be spitting out a mouthful of sand, so I just said: “fair enough.”
Two crunchy, dry words in which I felt both myself and Alba experience the sensation of being let down. Then I lifted my fork up and said, “yum, wow, this burrata is so good.”
The sensation of disappointment increased, but it was either that or giving it away that all I wanted was for someone like her to hold my hand through this strange season, to lead me out of my soggy sadness.
–
After lunch, six mimosas, three cigarettes, a declined dessert, two puffs of a blueberry vape, Alba stood up and said, “there’s a new vintage place down the road I’ve been wanting to go to, want to come?”
I said sure, happy to be pulled along somewhere to do something of note.
At the store, she pulled out a dress from a bursting rack. It was a deep purple and completely sheer. She held it up and said, “this would look so good on you.”
I pursed my lips around an “ohhh,” and shook my head. “No. It’s so sheer, I’d feel too self-conscious.”
She narrowed her eyes, staring down a feeling that personally offended her, and said, “why on earth would you feel that?”
“Well,” I gestured towards the dress and then my body, “it’s so, you know, hello. I’ve become boring, I guess. I fear I only wear black these days.”
I tried to laugh, it sounded like a bark.
She shook her head while still holding the dress up. “Since when? You’re adventurous and full of life, you’re not boring. What is all this about?” she asked me for the second time that day.
Seeing my old self projected from Alba’s memory of that self was odd. That self seemed to already inhabit the purple dress like a ghost. She was who I wanted to be so desperately when I was younger. She certainly wasn’t who I was this January. Where had I gone wrong? All this time, I hadn’t been setting the world on fire, I had been setting myself on fire. Now I was a charred, hollowed out version of myself playing it safe always and wondering why I kept missing the moment.
“Give me that,” I took the dress from her and walked into the changing room.
When I emerged, fingers over my nipples otherwise on display, she said, “yes, you have to get it. We’ll go out for drinks, you’ll wear that.”
“Ok,” I acquiesced, and I imagined our friendship leaping across the decade and us morphing from sunkissed teenagers on a golden beach drinking raspberry Cruisers, skipping the middle bit, erasing it even, the part where we lived separate lives and I became boring — remember that, when I was boring! My boring phase! We’d say later — morphing into two magnetic women fulfilling their plans for setting the world alight together.
–
Of course I didn’t see Alba again. In February, I messaged her and she replied to say she’d flown to New York for work and that she’d let me know when she was back. I knew she wouldn’t. I knew it when it happened in January, this serendipitous overlap of lives, that it was the wrong month. Despite this, I had been right: fate wouldn’t have waited.
And though I had been a frantic, hopeful, wretchedly hungry version of myself, so that Alba in all her vibrancy had bounced right off me, repelled by my desperation, our meeting had been what I needed in that manic month to reassure me that I was not myself but that myself was waiting a mere few months away.
By March, I was no longer gnashing my teeth, and by April, I was clear headed again. I felt myself emerging from clouds, as though they were dispersing from around me and as the white foamy masses dematerialised into air, there I was, clear as day.
I pulled out from my wardrobe the sheer dress I’d bought on that sticky January day and wore it out for the first time. I had the idea that perhaps I would reach out again to Alba, but by then, the desire I’d felt to prove I was in fact still interesting, still creative, still something of the person she and I both once knew, had dissipated. What had I been trying to prove in January? I could no longer remember.
In May, walking in the autumnal chill, I inhaled deeply and as I released my breath I shook my head, as though to clear away the last remaining cobwebs that stuck gently to me. I tilted my face to the sky and the clouds hurrying over and I thought, life is weird. I’m here now, and I was there then, and all of it changes no matter what. The Something would always be quivering somewhere, forming and reforming, waiting for the next January in which it would morph into a thing big enough to swallow me whole.
–
Madeleine Lumley Prince is a writer and designer from Sydney, Australia. She is currently living in Copenhagen. She has been writing stories and poems all her life. She is drawn to creative explorations of the complexity of human experience. This is her debut publication.
© 2025, Madeleine Lumley Prince
Halfway Down the Stairs 