by Hannah Storm

It’s been two hours since Google Maps glued us together.

“What if there’s something I need to tell you,” you say, your fingers lacing mine.

“I know.”

I’ve known since the last time we were together, when you told me you loved me. I didn’t say the words then and now I wonder if it would have made any difference. But you knew it.

“I love every bit of you. I always have.” You had kissed away my insecurities then on someone else’s Egyptian cotton sheets.

In New York, every street corner holds a story. Here on 45^th and Broadway, we share ours. These are the places and sounds that have featured in films and songs that promise something we can’t have. And yet here we write our own words and record our own scenes.

“I know,” I tell you, as those three words break all the promises I’ve made.

Time never stops. Not here. Neon lights, theatres that turn love and loss into entertainment, flicker above our heads.

This is their stage. This is ours.

Later you kiss away my worries again and I slip into sleep. I dream of a baby born to a woman who isn’t me. I wake to an empty room, sirens shrieking like the wails of a new-born, to an empty womb and to a city full of you.

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Hannah Storm has been a journalist for twenty years and has recently started writing other stories as a way of paying tribute to some of the extraordinary people she has met and the places she has been, as well as processing her own experiences. She lives with her family in the south of England, somewhat uprooted from her northern roots, and juggles writing with motherhood, work, and running long distances when she needs time alone. Her Twitter handle is @hannahstorm6.