Maria Kelly is dead.

Maria Kelly is dead.

Maria Kelly has been dead for 8 or 9 months before she is found.
“Maria” Kelly perhaps is not English – her name would be “Mary”, would it not.
Maria Kelly has died “of natural causes”, says the coroner.
My next door neighbour has never heard of Maria Kelly, or that she is dead, or that she was found mummified, or that she was our neighbour.
XX amount of calls, and XX amount of visits before Maria Kelly was found to be dead.

My door bell rings, and it's Frankie, a journalist from the local newspaper.
She wants to know if I know about Maria Kelly, or that Maria Kelly is dead. “What the council has done to prevent this”. I did not know until this unexpected visit.
I say that I have a lot to say about housing, about vulnerable women with mental health issues, and the council.
“Come upstairs”. I buzz her in.

I bore her with my own anecdotes of bureaucratic failure. I start a facebook page titled “What happened to Maria Kelly?” after I find nothing online about her. I think “a vigil would be a nice idea”. But I know I am too drained by my own survival efforts to organise it, and “pixels are friends”. This can be my minimum effort of a vigil. A resistance of absolute silence.

I look her up online – another account comes up, with common friends, common themes, possibly queer or at least queer-adjacent. Is it her? When did she last post? What was it about? She is with friends in places I could be, with people that look like they could be with me. It's another Maria Kelly - still alive, this one.

Maria Kelly is dead of “natural causes” at 54. Perhaps she was 55 by the time she was found.

Was it the smell? It can't be, after all these months. Maybe XX amount of months is the final frontier of non-involvement in a London estate. I speak to my neighbour at his smoking corner near my flat door.

It would be good to check if anyone else needs help, I say. If someone needs a meal, or, you know, some sort of community.

“They don't care – the government does not care,” he says. We both know that.

“But we must care,” I say predictably.

“It's best not to interfere too much, keep to yourself and to your business – or you may get in trouble.”

I agree that I don't want people knocking on my door randomly, or lose my privacy, but surely there must be a balance, a risk we are willing to take.

I meet M. [he tells me what happened to his mother, how she jumped into the void – but not the void: it was a school yard; how she kept asking when the school year is over, the image of the woman breastfeeding on his flight to Athens, his home without storage because it was meant for hiv+ ppl only... a “short stay”.]

[I visit my local barber. I compliment the old-school decoration, but he is new. Only a few weeks here – his family back in Romania, but he enjoys the solitude at home. I agree, but perhaps we have convinced ourselves that this was a choice. Or the best option. Maybe it was the only option.]

“Crazy...crazy for feeling so lonely” is on repeat on my ears all day long. I look the singer up.

She died one year after this well known and iconic performance. Unnatural age to die, hers - as well.

I tell the journalist my own story of seeking help when I was homeless, when I was about to be homeless, when I was housed by the state but made homeless. She says there is no way to tell this story as it becomes complicated, and can't be explained in a short article. I understand, and I also realise that this is a way this system works (also in intimate abuse , and that is why both state and intimate / public and private converge – I wish more people understood this).

I also wish we stopped thinking in such a binary way: either keep to myself, or have my privacy violated.

A friend invites me to take photos of his show. I am only given this information: it is a show, and it is his. And I am going to take photos for them.

After the show, we talk about space shrinking in academia, quite literally... merging offices, several people working in the same office. “How am I supposed to write a novel like that?' I am reminded of J., and how painful it was for her when they forced her out of her office space into a smaller space. How meticulously we packed and unpacked her books and belongings when we were only moving them one floor away. How meaningful it must have been. (also: see Eco on libraries / collecting).

As I write these words, I am on a flight to Athens myself. There is no woman breastfeeding, but my mother's death is always ticking like a bomb to the rhythm of number of flights. The bass drops again and again as I no longer count in months and years, but more pragmatically: how often will I be able to travel? 1 to 2 times a year. Not more. Less, perhaps. And that is a tax I pay for being an immigrant. Savings always obliterated by these flights even if I fly with the cheapest one, and even if I drink and eat nothing.

I am wearing a proper covid mask – saw only one other person still masking. I would say that humanity will look back to this era and see the absurdity, but the absurdity is that we no longer take the continuation of our species for granted. And I don't mean in a scale of millennia or when the Sun eventually takes a plunge into its own supernova, but the extinction that actively threatens us.

I speak with L and S and tell them why an over-investment on national identities and traits is ludicrous. (How can you be against state violence, borders, war when you use nationalism as some kind of charming small talk? And I don't mean the “my nation is better than yours” kind, but the “this NaTiOn has these traits” kind of thing). I tell them that thinking that Greeks are lazy tax-evaders that live luxuriously on the islands is a North-West fantasy because that's all they know about contemporary Greece by visiting them as tourists. (What they don't know is how islands are running out of drinking water because of the swimming pools of the hotels hosting them. What they don't know is that Greeks speak at least two foreign languages through public education not because of classical values, but because we are expected to cater for them as waiters. What they don't know is that the most elegant my mother has ever looked was in her Marriott housekeeping uniform. Something about the fabric, the colour, the silhouette. And that is why watching “Parasite” and the mother's transformation once she works for the rich family truly broke me.)

I say “what happened to Greece/Greeks, is coming for you. Look at Greece as the blueprint of austerity / financial domination as a trajectory with lessons to avoid happening here. We got Golden Dawn. You got the whole (what's his name?). I marched against your fascists, and I marched against mine. You still think I would like “a siesta”, and that my life goals are left for “maniana” when I am not coping. When feeling and witnessing the world breaks my body.

Meeting with some other friends. Matter of the hour was that one of our English friends is marrying his immigrant girlfriend. They are in love, it's fresh, but the only way to see if it's real is to take this leap and make it possible for her to Remain. Of course, valid concern remains that this is the honeymoon period and marriage / co-habitation is a big change / commitment. Another valid concern is that this could put a lot of unnecessary pressure on their young connection. Truly a romantic gesture. And quite mad, as such.

I am haunted by one of the statements, that was repeated twice:

“She is getting A. Lot. Out of this. She is getting A. Lot!” with rare enunciation for an English person. I have been thinking – what in her imagination is “a lot”?

Being allowed to live and work in the UK of today? Is that not exactly the right everyone else in this group of people have? I don't want to say the “bad word” (ahem, “privilege”) but is that not obvious? Do they think ...I am getting “A Lot”? Thank god I know I am this place's salvation and beating heart. No London without people like us. No London at all. And are we all going to march against the war in Gaza with that mouth?

No London. No, London. No London without us. Without our unnaturally early deaths.