A dream is a wish your heart makes.

I can't sleep, I can't eat I can't drink and I can't stand it any longer. Scrolling back on her Twitter feed to 2010 has stopped relieving the itch. I just need to walk from Islington and Highbury tube station again and just walk down the street where she lives. Just to walk down that street again, as the person I am today. I have the virus the whole city has been struck down by this bank holiday. The air is crisp and the sun is bright.

I'm over the worst. I'm sure of it. My Mum has been nursing me in my twin single beds. I've been living back home for a little while. Floral Ikea duvet and childhood clutter all around. The nostalgic novelty of listening to my iPod nano and rattling the doll's house crockery in my palms like they are dice is wearing off. I feel the twisted adult compulsivities fizzing underneath my skin, in the flakes around my fingernails and thumping beneath my eyelashes.

I need to see her, not talk to her, just see if she still lives there. I pull dirty jeans and some male relative's oversized jumper over my pyjamas and slip out of the house, before checking on mum. She is dosing off watching 'who do you think you are'. The confrontation of the programme's name nearly makes me hesitate. But I don't.

I text mum saying I've gone for a walk. I get onto the number 3 bus into Brixton, catch the Victoria line into Highbury and Islington and walk and walk and walk towards her street. 17 minutes If you take the scenic street route. The whole journey passes me by in a blur, determined but not really awake. 13 Llewellyns Street. We stayed there all the time, me and him. He and I, he would correct, if he were still mine. When she would go on tour or literary festivals or the country to write. I remember getting the dinner on whist he'd go for a run, making sure the recipe was the correct combination of protein and carbs. To satisfy his calorie counting, his neurosis about his body which looked as if it were carved out of stone. How when I'd put the potatoes on to boil I would use this time to thumb through her cookbooks, study every note and photograph magnetically held to her fridge. How I accidentally found her most recent contract on a shelf shoved carelessly behind where she kept her spices, Malden salt, Tobasco, balsamic vinegar. The chicken stock cubes I used to always steal, knowing she was so public about being a pescatarian, being voted the UK's sexiest vegetarian in 2017 before the release of her book. How she'd pretend to cringe in interviews about this award, saying her agent said it would make good promotion. How the gleam of her smile would reveal her obvious honour in this title. The tiny cans of clementine tonic water in her fridge and expensive-looking gin in her freezer that I would help myself to, with her perfect cubed giant ice from a silicone tray. The heat from the summer and the meal I was lovingly preparing made condensation run down the glass and sweat down the small of my back. And that was just what happened in her kitchen.

I turn and pass the old bank that is now an Airbnb. I stayed there before it went online, a friend of a friend who'd acquired it needed someone to watch it overnight to accept deliveries. I stayed there for 3 nights, living off subway and costa coffees, and I was drunk all of the time. It's when smoking became a habit, not living with family who wouldn't approve. Huddled in the entrance with bare feet and taking long performative drags into the nights. The time flew and I slept on a ripped armchair from the 70s. The windows were boarded up and there was only an electric heater, I remember how the location made the commute to work so easy. Passing it today on my mission reminded me how adventurous I could be and how I could probably sleep anywhere. Strange that place came before him, and I never associated it with her place just around the corner. Our place. Places hold so many memories, and everywhere is close together, the memories fade like the map lines on an AZ that's been left on the dashboard in the sun for too long. But still, the places remain.

I don't associate the two locations because my bank stint was in the bitter winter, January time many years ago. I had a bleached bob and nights were taken up with pint after pint of cider and chain-smoking Marlborough golds out late in central. Being able to walk back to the bank as late as I felt like it. Her flat was over the bright spring and summer months just last year, I'd let my hair grow long and kept its natural colour, whilst being totally intoxicated with this love that wasn't a right fit. Like poorly made puzzles from a charity shop, you have to bash in place with your fist. I keep thinking of the heat of the flat, the sun piercing through the bay windows and waking us up at dawn during those first few stays. He didn't know how to work her blackout blinds. The chord was broken but you could roll it down yourself. One evening I was lulled into early sleep before him, bought on by cheap sparkling wine and sex, only to be woken up by him not an hour later gently but firmly lifting me up to the top of the window to pull down the broken blinds, he can't fix it like I can and he wants to sleep in tomorrow morning. Please, baby. Please. He's 6'7, we laugh about how he can't manage it and what would he do without me. People of his intelligence never have common sense. I used to love the feeling of living in her flat like I had come full circle and arrived. After years of binging and purging and men being cruel I had developed a fear of food, not knowing if I was going to break my portions into a million pieces so they disappear or insert whole mouthfuls straight into my throat, with no attempt to chew. Then I found her own recipe book, Ways of Eating. A play on words on John Berger's book. I didn't understand the reference then because I hadn't read Berger's book or much of any books. Her book wasn't just lists of methods and ingredients, it included heartfelt prose about falling in love with food after losing her appetite when experiencing different types of grief. A close friend gifted it to me when I was in, one of many, difficult spaces. The book is printed in an old time off white paper, with bold times new roman font and classical style drawings, vintage food photography, and a ribbon to mark your page. But it isn't actually like an old book, the cover is millennial pink, with a gold embossed font. It probably changed the life and dietary habits of every woman in their twenties that read it. It was a bestseller and made her famous. She became my comfort. I just loved to prepare myself a bowl of dried apricots stuffed with walnuts whilst scrolling her wholesome Instagram. Her cooking with her friends, dancing on tables at parties, her groovy plush pastel 60s aesthetic and always perfectly blowdried hair. Her at feminist marches and panels. Her giving live Q&As with advise for lost and wayward single girls like myself. Impossibly beautiful yet so relatable. She taught me to eat slowly and scroll fondly. Whenever a man I'd be shagging would be nasty to me, instead of going on a booze and fast food binge I would hide away re-reading her book, writing out my favourites into my own notebook - for lack of any original thought I felt necessary to record. But, like all things, I went too far.

Often in her stories, she'd tag this wonderfully witty, traditionally handsome Hercules of a boy. It was one of those Are they siblings or a couple mysteries at first. Too platonic and fond of him to be boyfriend, but too much time spent together to be a brother. It soon transpired through hours of listening to all of her podcast interviews that he was in fact her PA. They'd met at university studying journalism. I investigated him more and my fascination grew, he started becoming somebody I wouldn't follow but would check on regularly. He'd write the occasional quippy pieces for local north London newspapers, sometimes posting badly cropped screengrabs on his 302 post Instagram. His following fluctuated depending on how often his employer would tag him in stories - carrying her dry cleaning or delivering bouquets. He would sing musical numbers whilst she'd cackle behind her phone, or she'd zoom in close to his furrowed brow whilst he'd intently be studying a menu in a coffee shop they'd be working from that day. Coming out of her walk-in wardrobe wearing one of her over the top vintage hats whilst reading out appointments from her Smythsons diary. Then one day, in the Pret in Leicester Sq, I found him. He ordered a coconut latte, loudly chatting to the baristas whilst they shyly giggled. I could tell they weren't really listening to what he was saying, that his outright confidence and amped up English charm was overwhelming. I recognised it instantly. Social media makes every personality come across differently, and when it is thrust into your real-life it feels so extraordinarily odd, like seeing Kat from Eastenders coming out of a laundrette or your Grandad having avo on toast and a mimosa.

He was perfectly at ease with the space he took up in that Pret, until I approached him. Typical of most men. Godlike and God-complexed until you hone in on them with the natural insatiability that comes with being a woman with skin and hair and a scent, then they become little timid pubescent boys. We spent the day together, wandering around Trafalgar Square and Somerset House, then walking along the river to Embankment and having a glass of wine in Gordon's wine bar, which led to 7 whilst I pretended we were perfect strangers and that I had no idea who he was until this afternoon.

"We should have got a bottle" I slur

"I wouldn't have even thought of that" he stammers back

We kissed and it felt like we didn't stop kissing and drinking wine for 2 glorious weeks. 2 glorious weeks of him not minding me smoking or my tardiness or bad posture. He was a lodger in a weird old maisonette with a miserable old man just off the Kilburn high road, so was reluctant to have me stay the night at first. Very Darling Buds of May he used to laugh self-deprecatingly. I didn't know what that meant. I have never met anyone like him before. We waited six weeks until he pinned me down with his muscular legs in the dark of his tiny rented bedroom, clasping my open mouth with his giant hands to silence the electricity and ecstasy of each other. At my place, I hid all evidence of Her, blushed ever so slightly when he mentioned his boss and friend. The edging gasping reaching compulsive longing for wanting to be a plus one to the events she'd host. How could he not see this in my eyes? The hair on my body that would stand up on end when he would take her calls. The anticipation that she might be in the pub he would arrange to meet me in after work. My idol, my saviour, my comforting obsession. She never was. His work chat and close proximity to my favourite writer made it harder to enjoy her interviews, thumb through Ways of Eating and scroll backwards to the start of her Instagram. Seeing the scaffolding behind fame makes it harder to indulge in as a spectator. I met her a couple of times in passing and I could barely string a sentence together. She'd listen but I knew underneath that she was bemused. Then he started inviting me to flat sit with him and she always said that was fine. Why did she say it was fine? I'd try and leave her notes and bottles of wine to say thank you and he would say it was unnecessary and that it was his job to house sit and that I needed to stop caring about what strangers thought of me. But she had never felt like a stranger. Whilst he managed her inbox in the study I would lull in her freestanding bath, using all her bath oils whilst her interviews would play quiet and secretly from my laptop balancing on the toilet seat. I can't believe you use her bath oils, friends would exclaim when I divulged them. I felt like an intruder, but I had been invited in…like a vampire. I felt stupid. Then all the things he initially didn't mind about me started to become tiresome. My bad habits he would mistake as qualities. My jumpy behaviour, my panic attacks that manifested as tantrums, getting drunk and mean and not responding to his calls, shouting at him for getting in the way whilst I was cooking, getting too comfortable and asking too many questions about her and not about him. Smoking, not finishing the biscuits he'd bought especially for me and letting them go stale, going to parties with friends that were boys, smoking pot with friends that were boys and going to karaoke with friends that were boys, blacking out and not looking at my phone for 28 hours. I explained to him that she helped me eat normally again and he rolled his eyes, he'd heard it from lots of girls that had pursued him for being her PA. He snapped in our last argument that she may have helped with the food thing but I'm still a reckless pisshead with serious control issues. The irony of the calorie counting most body-conscious man in London said this, who worked for a food writer. I cried and he said sorry. We ate burgers on the steps of her flat in silence. We broke up. We'd been together just under a year.

Her public personality couldn't be a comfort to me anymore. She didn't remind me how food didn't have to be toxic anymore, she just reminded me of how toxic I was when I loved him. How I probably won't ever shake being toxic. My pasta became gloopy and soft as I'd zone out watching it boil. Oysters would just taste like gritty snot, champagne like a headache. I let fruit flies and dull brown tones ruin the untouched fruit in the bowl. Potatoes were too salty and hard. Steak tough. Truffle oil smelt like spit. Butter and mayonnaise felt like drowning. I ate so many salt and vinegar crisps my tongue felt burnt and fluffy.

So I retracted in and went hungry.

Now I am here today on the street, where she lives. My nose running my eyes streaming. Not sure if it's from the wind in the tube tunnel, the virus or the past. I am sweating and shivering. He is there and so is she. They are painting the windowsills baby blue. They look up and I dart back around the corner unsure if they have seen me. I scarper as fast as my weak muscles can manage, stumbling by a bakery. A posh one. A pastel coloured modern trendy one. I go in and ask how much the custom Aston Villa FC cake is. It has light blue and maroon icing. It's big and it's square. It's made to feed 12. I ask how much and it's £70. I pay knowing it will go into my overdraft. I make the journey back to Dulwich and my mum is still asleep on the sofa. Shut-in my childhood bedroom I eat the football cake. No, I devour the football cake, pushing my face into the centre of it with my hands leaning on the floor like I'm a pig with a trough until all that is left is the sticky plastic box and the base layer of jammy sponge. I look up into the mirror and see blue icing on my eyelids. Baby blue.

I find a pen and scratch NEVER MEET YOUR IDOLS onto the hard foiled base of the cake and gently lift it out of the window onto my mum's conservatory roof.

I watch magpies and crows pick at it until it goes dark. I hear them squawking as my eyes droop, fighting over the last crumbs. I am sick onto the wobbling plastic box.

I wake up the next day by the morning light from the blinds I didn't close. There was no one to close them for. The Aston Villa cake is gone.