“Hey! You putting that trolley back?” I freeze in the Sainsbury’s car park, it is only 8:28am and I know no one. Am I being spoken to? Am I the intended recipient of chat?
I turn with fear, I am here early in order to avoid interactions. I am being stared at by a pair of inquisitve eyes and an outstretched hand.
“If you’re putting the trolley back, take my pound and I’ll take the trolley”
Human time and I push a thought as far from the surface and deep into the mire of my mind as speedily as time flows.
“Sure! Here you go,” is what someone else should say and so I do. I take the pound and hand over the trolley and I sit sadly in my car.
This pound coin is not my pound coin, Not THE pound coin that I have kept in my car’s little cup well for the last four years. That pound coin is with another, not me, who has kept and protected it against being just loose change.
This new pound coin feels rougher and looks shinier and all I can think is that is not my pound coin.
What must my pound coin think of me? That I would give it up so easily, that I would eschew our time together, all those journeys around the supermarkets being the most useful little coin ever?
I could not tell her this, these thoughts that zip through my mind with such a furore.
“It’s just a pound coin,” she would think. And she would be right. To her, it is.