I ride the Northern Line with my sister from Hampstead to Tottenham Court Road. Across from us sits a young man. He is probably in his mid-twenties with curly hair, fashionable slacks, a button down and dress shoes, and he is drinking a can of Foster’s lager. He is alone. There are delicate pink bruises beneath each eye, maybe self inflicted by lack of sleep. He carries a crumpled canvas duffle and as the car fills he moves it to make way for an older woman to sit next to him. The train jolts and an empty can rolls out of his bag, and, pinker than before, he hurries to retrieve it from the floor by someone else’s feet and tucks it, crumbled neatly, into an outer pocket. By the time he exits at Euston, two other empties have joined it. I suspect there is nothing else in the bag. Some small part of me travels with him as he—I know—boards an escalator which carries him up into hot, fresh summer.

I stayed for nine nights in a house in northeast London with three of my coworkers and eighteen of my teenage students. We had three bathrooms between us and one singular front door key. We threw open windows and cried and cooked and laughed. Sometimes we slept. This past Tuesday, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum and I went up as many stairs as I could until I arrived somewhere I’d never been before, where the whole fourth floor was rooms and rooms of ceramics. They were organized by year and by country and they went on and on through time and place: flowering plates and teapots shaped like camels and ornate bowls the size of bathtubs and figurines of eighteenth century politicians. Room after room after room of bone china labored over with stamp and glaze and heel of hand by people who believed that beauty mattered but had no idea that what they made could last.

His mercies never come to an end. Each morning they are made new—dear and fresh.