You’re looking well, he says, looking me up and down.

Looking well, what does this mean? I decide this statement of his is loaded, long before he repeats himself once, twice. A sideways look of appraisal.

I tell him I slept four hours. When I woke, damp T-shirt and the hazy remainder of a dream ebbing and flowing in time to the constant ba-thump playing behind my eyes, I found myself a day ahead of the pale, wide-eyed people sitting in the stairwell with cons tucked under thighs, discussing nationalism and existentialism in the same sentence. In the bathroom two girls wring out small bundles of clothes in a sink, watching their reflections. God awful, one mutters at herself. Guy sleep-walked into the corner of the room and pissed into a suitcase.

Well, he says, you look well anyway. 

Glances at my legs from under eyelashes, triumph playing on his lips.

Loaded.