The hordes were out in full force. Of course, in a place like this, they always were. But today was particularly “extra.” Not just because it was a Saturday—the day people most love to get their rocks off, leisure time-wise—but because it was game day. And not just any game—the semi-finals. The football fans (in the European sense of that phrase) were, thus, taking over every available public space where there was a screen. And oh, how there were so many public venues with a screen. Especially in London.

Andrea hadn’t accounted for this when scheduling her trip there. And, considering she hadn’t been back in almost a decade, she wished she had planned the dates more carefully, for this was not the vibe she was going for. After all, London was always teeming with plenty of testosterone already without adding football into the mix to make matters even worse. Alas, being as perennially tuned out of sports as Andrea was, her fate seemed doomed to succumb to this football frenzy. Besides that, she didn’t actually have any friends or family in London that might have warned her.

While some would be puzzled over the idea of going to a city without any connections whatsoever, for Andrea, that was the entire point. She loved going to places where she could effortlessly slip into anonymity, a task that had become more and more of a challenge these past few years of becoming enmeshed in the incestuous world of talent management. But in London, she was no one. And back when she had briefly lived there, it involved no pursuit of a career, but the pursuit of a “lad.” His name was Rhys, and they had first met on Melrose Avenue outside Headline Records. Andrea was just eighteen then, freshly graduated from high school, and she had chosen to wait, like a “good girl,” until she was of legal age to start smoking cigarettes. Thus, when Rhys walked out of the shop and saw what a blatant novice Andrea was in the art of the puff, he quite simply burst out laughing.

Andrea, already an inherently self-conscious person (as most teenage girls are), glared at him in response. Suddenly realizing that his laughter was coming across as offensive, Rhys stopped, approaching her to apologize.

“I’m sorry, luv. I wasn’t tryna take the piss out of you or nuffin’—I’ve just never seen someone smoke a fag so incompetently.”

Andrea took another drag and blew the smoke right in his face. “I have no idea what the fuck you just said.”

Rhys grinned. “You’re a cheeky one, aintcha?”

Andrea rolled her eyes. “Do you have some kind of point you’d like to arrive at?”

He leaned in closer, disarming her with his gaze. “Only that I’d like to teach you how to properly smoke so that some arsehole like me never laughs at you again.”

They say men who “teach” women to do something for the first time are likely to stay with her for the rest of her life. That every time she does that thing he mansplained to her, her mind will invariably wander back to him. That’s why, when things fell apart with Rhys—after she followed him to London like a woman crazed with lovesickness—she had to give up smoking. She would only think of him every time she did it now. In a way, then, she owed him a thank you for being so triggering. It probably added years to her life, and spared her skin the look of someone of much older. But it took her a long time to arrive at that point. To recover from how hard she fell for Rhys.

For about two months, he actually let her live with him in his dingy warehouse flat in Hackney (before the gentrification wave). But it was clear to her that he was starting to question what she was doing there. To him, she seemed entirely pathetic because her only purpose was him. She made no effort to try getting a job (she still had her parents giving her money back then) and even less effort at trying to establish friendships that might give Rhys a break from the pressure of having to constantly be around her, to “account” for her. Five years her senior, he started to use the excuse that she was too young for him, and that maybe she ought to think about returning home to Los Angeles.

The thought of leaving, of being separated from Rhys felt like a spear jabbed through her heart. That’s the thing about first love—or what one thinks is first love: you’re even more irrational with your behavior than you are with “average” love. She wanted to scream at him, and also to hug him, cling to him tightly. If she had screamed at him, she would have said, “I wasn’t ‘too young’ when you were fuckin’ me up the ass last night.” Maybe she shouldn’t have let Rhys go there. Maybe that was part of the reason why he was starting to respect her less. Granted, he already had so little esteem for her to begin with. She was a malleable little girl in his eyes. In the beginning, that had been the appeal, but now, it was his bane. And hers, too.

By the end of month three, Rhys had reached his limit. He could no longer beat about the bush, telling her outright to get the fuck out. That he had no use for a “clingy git” like her. That was the first time London broke her heart, and part of why she had stayed away from it for so long. Now, it seemed, she was here for a second time to have her heart broken by it, shoved and tossed about like a ragdoll amid the rabid throngs. All clamoring to get closer to the screen. One thing she did like about Rhys, to this day, is that he didn’t give a damn about sports of any kind. That’s why they had found one another outside the record store. Music-minded people didn’t care about such bollocks. One of the best stereotypes there is. While one of the worst (in terms of accuracy) is that British people are all rambunctious drunk fucks.

It was holding true amid the latest “Euros” match (that’s UEFA European Championship, to the unseasoned). After spending at least an hour looking for a “passable” public venue for a bit of a sit-down, Andrea had mistakenly assumed she found a “quiet” (or at least quiet-ish) port in the storm. For about ten minutes, the noise was kept to a dull roar. But that was only because the game hadn’t actually started.

Once again, Andrea had been a victim of her own willful disinterest in procuring information before going somewhere. And now she was paying the price as she ended up viciously elbowed in the temple, leaving a bruise so massive that, later that day, if one were to only glance at her, they might have thought she had some form of vitiligo. Icing her head back at the citizenM in Shoreditch, she wondered for the umpteenth time in three days just what, exactly, she was doing here. Was there a sick, masochistic part of her hoping to run into Rhys or something? Because, apart from that, it was becoming crystal-clear that London, yet again, had nothing to offer her but pain—and now it was literal. This whole thing had been a huge mistake. Some subconscious, misguided attempt at “making peace” with the past.

It was a mistake so huge that Andrea decided to cut her trip short, even though she was supposed to have stayed a full two weeks. She didn’t immediately go back to L.A. though, taking a detour in, of all places, Vermont. Opting for the Dorset of that state, rather than the more famous one in England. It was quiet there. The kind of quiet she had been seeking ever since she got to London. And presently, she had to contend with the task of quieting her mind, too. For it was fraught with thoughts of the pathetic girl she once was, back when she viewed a prat like Rhys as the end all, be all of her world.