I can vanish. I can close my eyes and I can’t see you, you can’t see me. I can close my throat and put everything I’d say somewhere else and you can’t stop me, you can’t see me. I can watch the world end and I can fire it up again, I can be the girl with the power of God on her eyelids, I can shut you out, I can stop this. I should.

You shouldn’t talk about love. There’s no need to tell the world how it feels and what it means and why it matters. How old it is, how long it’s festered inside of you and how it hurts and why you’ve wanted it so badly and what that’s like - getting a thing you’ve always wanted, how it matches up. I shouldn’t listen to a word you say, I shouldn’t watch your face as you say it, I shouldn’t let you stay.

We’ll start with the house, which was large. Three staircases deep and so long all of us who worked there had ox strong legs and I had strong arms too, I could walk on my hands and sometimes, when no one was around, I would, I’d tickle the carpet with my fingers because it felt like we were in the belly of a whale and I wondered if he’d sneeze us out.

So the house was big and it was old and it was dry like old things are, like a leaf that’s kept together by the bones and has to be handled carefully because it’s so old, so old and dry and precious. We spent more of the day tending to the house than the people, who were only pieces of proud, high furniture, with ancestral rights to a place there. In need of constant reassurance that the house belonged to them when the truth was the opposite.

I lived in the belly of the whale for eight years, longer than Jonah and Gepetto and I liked it, for the most part. I liked the entrance hall in the mornings, when the light filled it like water fills a pot. I liked the routine, I liked having a job I could learn like lines, learn by heart. I liked the kitchens, I liked the drama, I liked a large group of people trapped in one huge house and acting out their lives like the house was a stage, like the world was listening, like their lives were a story to tell and to scream and to sing. I felt safe there - there were two worlds and the world of the house, it was just as real and exciting but it was safer than the other world, which couldn’t get in, couldn’t get at us. I stayed there as long as I could, I was sad to leave, but I never had love there. It was all arms and no heart; being handled but not held. Love came after the house.

What I’m used to is long days in empty rooms and people five feet away and conversations that end with that smile like, I’m safe with this. Took nothing, learnt nothing, gave nothing away, tried and tested, said it all before, so have you. Tell me all about that new air freshener you got for your car and what you had for tea last night and the shitty sexist piece of crap movie you saw this weekend I’m really interested I swear. I swear, I swear I always fucking swear it’s the most I dare do.

What I’m used to is stranded, like the road from my house is a way out but it’s full of dead men and barred by metal monsters and the only escape route is Trojan horse so stranded. Most days, stranded, most places stranded and living off scraps on an island full of people who like their own space, keep to themselves.

I mean I lie for a living and I hate it because my dream is to lie for a living, art you know. Lie lie lie truth lie, selling exterior home improvements works the same because I want to write how I feel, some truth about how I feel but it comes out obscene and the price of these windows, it’s obscene. You have to wrap it up nice, go in with the three for two and the existing customer discount and the ninety six hour sale and the working in your local area for a limited time only bullshit. Push it push it, sit lying on the phone all day, get pissed off the moment someone calls your out on it, say, “Some people are so fucking rude”. I go to work, get on the phone, sell a conservatory. I come home and I write and I sell myself.

And I’m not used to fingers on my spine and I’m not used to five feet closer. And I want to write you poetry but poetry is just metaphors and shopping lists of chiseled out contradicting feelings; you make me happy and sad, hot and cold, alive and dead and none of that gets close and no metaphor applies and it’s too soon for poetry. And too soon is what? Time and the talking you fit in that time? Taking time and sitting on the train with my eye on the time, hands shaking, right up there on the richter scale, we’ll see each other soon.

When I was at school I liked History, but I liked English too. They’re basically the same thing I think, stories and trying to understand them. Except History is true.

Or no, no. History doesn’t tell you exactly, completely what happened at one time, that’s stupid. I just mean… So, there’s a War, for example, and it happens to thousands and thousands of people - you can’t just get a few memories of that War and maybe some lies as well and call it History with a capital, “H” and true. It’s like when a book is fiction or whatever, but it’s trying to get at something. True and real and fact are like these things that make sense and sit still so you can look and learn and understand but history isn’t like that, it’s buzzing. So when you learn it you only learn a story that’s trying to get at what happened, a version that explains everything as best it can.

I’m trying to say… I wish they made Science and Maths and those things that easy, that beautiful and I wish they’d tried to get it through to us more, so we understood. Because I was done with school by the time it clicked with me, what atoms and everything were and what that meant. And I wish I knew more, could explain more, because I think that’s the best way to - It’s just that I’m always buzzing as well and I like it, but I want to say something still, I want to give you something still and certain and if I knew what I was talking about… I feel like I fell asleep in biology or physics one day and missed the lesson on why every cell in my body wants to be a cell in your body.

She thinks I give her too much credit, I see her too perfectly but that’s all anyone ever does. How else am I supposed to think of you; a person, a person, a person? I can’t get anything from that, don’t get me started on how a human being doesn’t make sense, it’s a thought I can’t claw my way out of.

Yes, love, I put you on a pedestal, every piece, even the parts I shouldn’t  even your petty lies, pretending like you’re innocent of all the things you really want. You’re selfish; you sleep on your stomach and it’s undignified, unattractive. I liked you first, I like you best straight out the shower, skin scrubbed red and raw. This is nothing new; I’m not saying I’m a saint for seeing you better than you are, I’m not saying you’re special someplace else, somewhere outside my head but that’s a place too.

She thinks I idolize her. She thinks I imagine a girl but don’t know her, that there’s no way I could. There isn’t a secret to knowing what someone’s really like, you just have to be with them, live with them, do it slowly. Time. Yeah, that one. Again, or still. Forever and ever.

I’d fallen asleep in the early evening; furious, fully clothed, curtains wide open. I woke up the next morning with the bad taste in your mouth you get when you fall asleep at the wrong time, I thought I’d woken up with the light, thought I’d woken up when the buttons and corners on my clothes got too uncomfortable to sleep in, but I woke up to the sound of a car door. My bed was pressed to the wall under the window; I got up and sat on the sill, blinked at the blue-grey sky - he was looking up at the house and I waved but he didn’t see me, his eyes were rolling across the building, sometimes I forget how big it was. By the time he got to my window my hand was back down and I was staring and strange.  He got into the car, the gravel crackled and the day looked bigger once he’d disappeared from it, like I was zooming out, zooming up into the sky, looking at a world that was bigger, full of people who were smaller.

I didn’t think all too much of why he was leaving or where he was going - not then, not that morning, I went downstairs and thought about apologising to everyone I’d lost my temper with the night before. I thought about myself, in bed only thirteen hours earlier; pressing my face into the pillow, hating them and hating me, every inch of my body, wishing I could be a better man. I didn’t apologise, I padded around the kitchen defiantly. I didn’t meet their eyes, I didn’t offer to make anyone a coffee. Emily said, “I thought you were leaving?”. and I kept my temper, I replied, “Not today.” She smiled her kind, killer smile while someone sniggered and I felt sick, and I wished he’d taken me with him. I wished I had a life where that would’ve occurred to him, to anyone. I wished I was somewhere else. 

Did I really think that way? Like a timeline, like a witness statement? I saw this and I felt that and I thought how sad I was. I’ve had so many conversations about time and the past, and the future and people are always saying things like, “time is never linear”. It’s the sort of statement that sounds a whole lot smarter than it really is - time isn’t a line, nothing is a line except a line, but that’s how history lessons work, that’s how time feels, like you’re walking a long road, a scenic route. You strain to see as far ahead as you can when you’re not craning your neck back around to see where you’ve been. If you focus on your feet you’ll fall down.

It was the day I met my best friend. I heard her before I saw her.

Read More

We are female. We are flammable.
This building reeks of skies and miles
It makes us retch;
Us, skeleton girls with smoking bones.

I do not care for birds -
the jackdaw or the Wren.
They locked us underground, grave girls.
They heard us scream as
we were interred, soil filling our ears.
The earth worms whispered,
“These skeleton trees do not belong,
they will soar past things that are built
they will grow, spiny, dry and yellow
sick, sick to the sky.
They will only care for the height.”

We were buried amongst scholars, and kings,
and poets - we Queens! Below the birds.
We have no time for their creations.
They are the reason we have no flesh -
picking our eyes, fresh and fine,
the best of the bunch, our drooping eyes.

They saw them. Globular. Like eggs
and took. Cuckoo. To raise as their own.

They wish their young were as green.

Minimum wage is the worst; a little nod from whoever it is that pays you - they won’t take any time to figure out how much you’re worth, how much the work you do is worth. They would pay you less, if they could, but they can’t so they’re paying you the absolute minimum. But those are the jobs you want, the one’s where no one notices you, the jobs where you couldn’t make a splash if you tried and those were the jobs we got. Supermarkets, factories, waiting tables, field work.

My first summer here I spent with a large stapler; one that used compressed air and a foot pedal. I made skyscraper stacks of large cardboard boxes all day, tapping my toes to a terrible radio station and watching the skin on my hands turn tough, thick, immune to any paper cut. No one has ever made a shoe that can soothe your feet on fire after ten hours on a concrete floor and no sound is crueler than the klaxon the play to let you know your fifteen minute lunch break is over, gone forever - back to it. I brought home bones that spluttered and struggled to breathe and a head with nothing in it but boxes. I dreamed about making boxes, I  sat down, finally, in the evenings, felt my feet throb at that absence of pain and tried to eat something but my hands could only move to make boxes. We all have a routine; whether it’s sleeping in until midday and cereal or blinking your eyes open, 6:42 AM sharp. Breaking a routine will break your heart.

“You don’t want to stay there too long.” Toby told me after my first week, “That sort of work is so soul-destroying,” but my soul felt safe in it’s cardboard box. A day can be small and feel large, a life can be as simple and slow as a nursery rhyme but feel electric, epic, too fast - an odyssey. I can find passion anywhere; my heart soaring as I clocked in on a Friday (better than clocking out that same day because Friday is all about anticipation and promise), my temper flaring at a quarter to six when I’ve run out of boxes to make, have nothing to do. The tragedy of knocking over a tower of boxes, watching them domino into each other, all fall down as you stand there, helpless.

I hated that place as much as anyone would hate a place that gave your body a slow-motion beating. I hated it then and hate it now and i would never go back but it didn’t pummel my soul into submission, it never could have. They paid me the bare minimum and made me tired, and sad and I made them boxes, made myself a little older, made my dreams a little safer.

This is how it happened: I was living a different sort of life to the one I am now. Doesn’t it all come back to young? Young but still young; young but not young but young, relatively, and then young and old - that’s now, except my brain still thrashes about in my skull like a teenagers, just like back then. I was different though, the world suited me better, youth suited me better, my company knowing relatively little of who I was suited me better. I could let it out, whatever makes me shout and scramble the way I do, I could charge about like a cannonball, I could chatter at a mile a minute and zoom off again and leave them; scratching their heads and smiling, bemused, but smiling, you know, that’s something. That’s better than what I have now.

There’s not a lot I don’t remember about the day we met. I remember painting the entrance hall all morning; I remember being dizzy with paint fumes, I remember wrinkling my nose at the wallpaper and winking at Emily and a few of her friends as they walked past, dresses rustling. I remember she rolled her eyes. I remember my Dad wasn’t at dinner, but I knew where he was and I didn’t care. I remember discussing the horses with your Father, and not knowing thatFather - your Father, was who he was yet. I remember he wasn’t preoccupied  he didn’t check his watch every three minutes or stare out the window as if he was expecting someone. He didn’t know either, of course, but now I wonder why he didn’t feel it, like the earth shaking beneath your feet before you step on it. There was something like that I remember, a thickness in the air, a heartbeat in the ground like an echo. You were on your way, that’s what I remember most.

 Do you remember edging in and moving so slowly, trying not to make sound? Sometimes that can be heard more than just, stomping into a place and I heard it and it set me on edge. I considered you, more than I would have, usually. I took a good, long, hard look at the boy in front of me and I saw someone I liked. Isn’t that strange? You were so unsure back then, so nervous, so afraid, even, you didn’t trust anything, least of all yourself and you’re nothing like that now but you’re still thoughtful, you’re still quiet.

Is it fair? To say I’ve loved you for so long? I say it like it’s worth something; a real badge of honour, a testament to how I feel. I’ve loved you for a hundred years feels the same as I’ve loved you for ten minutes - I felt sick after ten minutes, I feel sick now and I said that once, to this guy, you remember him? Short with big brown eyes and a great smile, he stayed for a summer. He’d come to my room in the middle of the night, shut the door, smile at me and I couldn’t help it, I just had to smile back. Afterwards I spoke about you, sometimes. He said, “What’s love like then?” I didn’t know what to tell him, in the end I said it was feeling sick all the time. He didn’t look impressed but with love or with me, I don’t know.

I looked up when I heard a soft, creaking noise, which turned out to be her elbow shifting against the table. She was sat with the heel of her hand pressed into her face, squashing it, pushing the cheek and nose together; her mouth was that frown sleeping people wear.

I wanted to say something, and at first it was going to be, “I love you.” but I got stuck somewhere around the elbow and the frown and if they could be strapped together, with a system of strings and pulleys. Within a few seconds the only words I had were on bones and puppets with carved faces, that was all that made sense - what she was, sat in front of me. I sucked my lips into my mouth, tried to say nothing at all.

When you feel like you’re going mad, the very worst thing is losing your straight-forwardness. No longer being able to say something simple and feel certain of it, always doubting the truth of what words mean, hating the way they’re arranged; like wrong, pointed pictures. Sentences and paragraphs always start at the left, narrow out at the right, sharp on the tongue, shaped like knives, but the heart’s on the left, so that alright

You have to handpick each word carefully to get through to another person, to say what you mean, but I couldn’t, I was panicking, I did the opposite. I threw as many questions out there as I could, hoped one of them stuck. I tried not to talk out loud but it’s so hard when there are things you need to say and know, chattering inside your head because you won’t let them out - who are you when you leave? And where do you go when the lights go out and is it a place you’re afraid of, or somewhere you’d stay if you could or both? What do you remember about your seventh birthday? Who were your friends and did you cry every other day because you thought you might lose them? Because children are fickle, because children are brutal, because they were all a cut above and you could never seem to pick the right coat, or bag, or words. Did anything bad ever happen to you? Would you remember, every day, if it did? Who will you be when you leave this room?

I lived in the same house for thirty eight years and most of the time inside the house, too fucking scared of anywhere without walls. I’m not sure if I remember every day or just three; the two where something happened and the one when nothing did, standing in for all the rest.

It was a big house and a whole half of it was mine. I’d sleep naked, I’d leave my bed asleep sometimes, wake up in the shower; it was always seven thirty. Most mornings I was wiping the mirror or wrapping myself in a towel when Howard would knock on the door and say, “Melissa?” I’d tell him I was showering, and busy. That day, the second I remember, the last I was there, he said, “What do you want for breakfast?” I said, “I don’t mind, I’ll be down in a minute Howard” and he left. I never knew how long it took him to leave. I wasn’t moving until I felt he’d gone, so I stared at the mirror and I didn’t really see it, just my face and I was thinking that as far as I could see it wasn’t even a mirror at all, only a face in front of me, a red one – so I squinted until I could see the silver. Then I stared at the skin on my arm and thought about Howard’s skin, and how old it was, even though no one has the same skin they start off with. It replaces itself until it’s new, everything does. One day you wake up and you’re a completely different person.

The other only eventful day, the first one, was a year before. I’d washed and dressed and brushed my hair but he hadn’t knocked for me. I went to the kitchen and he wasn’t there. I thought, this is the day he doesn’t wake up. Okay. I made a coffee because I couldn’t deal with it straight away and I guess I thought I could put off seeing him cold and dead. When I’d finished I thought about a cigarette but decided not to, because it was stupid, acting like nothing was wrong. I went to his room thinking that once I’d found him and dealt with it I could smoke inside, he’d never let me do that.

He wasn’t dead but he was bleeding which is worse for some people but I can handle it. His bathroom had a glass cabinet and one of the doors had broken and sliced his arm, I don’t know how I hadn’t heard it smash, I must have been showering, not listening. We mopped up the blood together, which was fine, but there was this huge flap of skin just hanging there and he couldn’t stop looking at it, he’d been looking at it when I’d walked in. He said, “If I pulled at this Melissa, do you think it would all come off? I could shed my skin, like a reptile. I could be twenty one underneath.” I had to decide, right there, whether he’d told me that because his mind was going, or if it was something normal for him to feel and say. I’d never been old, so I couldn’t know if it was normal but I thought it must be hard. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

After that I started spending at least an hour, maybe more every day stood at the mirror – I’m pulling and pinching at my skin, stretching it out and just staring at it so hard like I can’t understand it at all, like it isn’t real and I’m not real and my face is the proof. There are all these bottles and bowls and products on my dressing table and they make me think of people, the normal ones who grow up, grow old, fall to pieces, start to die… Because a can of hairspray or a tube of lipstick doesn’t do that, at worst it just gathers dust and I’d do that too, if I stood still for long enough.

I liked the idea of being different for so long, I wanted to be special, it didn’t scare me as much as it should have and I collected the clues, evidence for it all the time. When I was five I flung myself into a neighbour’s garden pond and nearly drowned. I was wearing a huge, outsize grey cardigan that I loved  and it spread out over the water, pulling my little arms up. I was stuck; kicking and wriggling and slapping  enormous goldfish around with the bare soles of my feet while my Mum just sat and watched. It was the neighbour who pulled me out, he was old and it took him so long. I remember thinking that the sound of his back and knees popping as he hauled me up was just like fireworks. They talked about it afterwards, all of us sat in the kitchen, me swaddled in a bath towel, sipping hot chocolate; him shell shocked and panicked because he would never have forgiven himself, I could have died. Her. She just said, “It was now or never”. That was the first clue.

My Mum married the neighbour’s nephew when I was nearly twenty but she told him I was fourteen. I thought at first he might be sick in the head. She wanted to get married so badly, have the house, share the bed and maybe a little girl would sweeten the deal. It wasn’t that, it was the second clue. My new Step-Father was called Howard and I lived with him nearly thirty years, even though the common cancer got my Mum not long after she became his wife. The third thing… the very last shred of evidence she gave me was then, a few days before she died. We always hated each other, Mother and daughter and I think she was pleased that dying didn’t change anything. I nearly cried, I felt sick and desperate, I spent the whole time begging her to tell me something about my real Father but she wouldn’t, not even a name and God, I hated her. Before I left the room she said, “You’ll be just like him you’ll see, this won’t happen to you. You won’t ever stop.”

I hid her words in the corner of my brain but never really knew, not until forty, at least. One evening my stepfather was dozing off and he smiled stupidly at me. He said, “Lissy, you don’t look a day over seventeen.” I felt sick and excited, felt my stomach lurching like I’d eaten the information but it had gone off. My hair was skimming my elbows and I thought of a hundred years from that moment, and how long it would grow if I let it. I cut it short right then and there, made myself look awful with a pair of blunt nail scissors for no good reason, the blades scratched at the nape of my neck. 

So I can’t say my Mother didn’t prepare me at all but by the time the new millennium was here I was thirty six years old and didn’t look a day over eighteen - forty came and went and I was scared. We stopped leaving the house, Howard and me and we looked after each other as best we could while one of us died and the other did something else entirely.

Before I came here I didn’t know how people were supposed to be. People as in everyone, not just the ones like me with this thing inside of them but the whole majority of the Earth, I didn’t see all that much of a division back then, I didn’t see them and think, you’re flapping about as fast as you can, like bluebottles caught in the corner of windows. I guess I do now. We all have the same blood and shit and same stupid thoughts running through our heads but the truth is that time changes everyone, even them and having so much of it makes you different. I don’t know if anyone here knows what they were ten years ago, twenty years ago, longer. I don’t think they could call themselves the same person but their faces don’t change, our faces. Normal people have that at least. People cut their hair a lot here.

I had a dream that wasn’t like any dream I’ll have again, I know, because it was just a memory, exactly as it was, clearer than if I’d been awake, or even in it. It’s my Dad, trying to figure out this basic, bog standard television set and looking down at me and saying, “I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea what I’m doing” and I laugh.

By the time I wake up the day is dull and I feel sick like I’ve forgotten something huge or done something terrible; so terrible that it’s started living inside me and wriggling and pushing at my skin, trying to get out and show the world it’s face, it’s fangs, when that’s exactly what I’m trying to hide.

She’s in the kitchen. Busy, with her back to me, so I move closer, press my fingers against the smallest part of her waist. I know, now, that I held on too tight and hurt and I know she yelled and pushed away at me but then it was like… My hands were all I knew and my everything was in them. They were alive like sock puppets without skin until I stepped back and she threw a dish towel in my face and I knew people were staring but I didn’t know how many.

I leave the room and realise, as I’m stuck walking around a radiator, that it’s happening again - I’m only aware of my feet and they’re moving like my mind’s slipped into them. I sit. I tell myself I’ve a whole body and it’s complete and controlled but it’s not working, so I try it one a piece at a time: I think about my knee and I know it’s there. I think about my lips and then my nose and I think about how some parts of my body are so much more present that others, like how you can’t always know you have a nose or ears or elbows because you can’t move them as much, as independently; they don’t act like they’ve got a will of their own like fingers and feet and lips.

Toby comes in and I don’t say, “I am going crazy” I say, “I feel sick” but it’s not true anymore, I’ve been thinking so much and so hard, like I’m trying to inflate my brain into a balloon, that I’ve stopped feeling anything. He says, “Yeah. I thought you looked a bit under the weather yesterday. Maybe it’s the flu.” He doesn’t step back like he might catch it and for a second I think, how kind that is, until it occurs to me that maybe he’s not worried about getting sick because he doesn’t really think I’m sick. I twist my hands together, I bend the right one back so the skin stretches at the wrist and  I imagine it ripping like a paper bag and all my secrets spilling out. Toby is still here. I can feel him looking at me and maybe frowning now so I get up, walk back to my room and back to bed but I might as well have crawled. I start to fall asleep again and try not to think about people thousands of years ago who didn’t know all the names of their body parts, who didn’t even know they had organs. I try to find my pulse but can’t and panic until I press my palm against my chest, feel my heartbeat, drift off.

They’re having a conversation about me.

It was whispered at first but why bother, give up on that six minutes in, maybe seven. He’s not there.

I’m here but not here, I’m on the ceiling, bobbing like a balloon; sinking, seeing, or starting to before I’m off, I float away again and it’s too loud up there. The roar in my head, the wind in my ears.

“We don’t really have a choice in keeping him here, do we? It has to be this way because the other options -“

“ Aren’t really options?”

“No.”

This would be fine, convenient even, if I had a say in it, had something like a dimmer switch in my head, on off on off, but I’m not the switch I’m the light bulb. In out in out, desperate to stay, to say something and about to before it’s gone or I’m gone and I can’t. Someone says, “It’s not fair,” and she looks at me and I raise my arms and I raise my tongue too late. It’s for the best, I don’t have time for that, I’m a busy man. Places to be and not be. No room for romance.

You are fifteen and here is Blake and here is Tolkein and they don’t have much in common except they like girls with hips like yours. You’re onto a winner here; these are wise men, they like far green countries and women who could rear children and chop down trees.

You know everything. If you woke up in the early hours and someone happened to be there you’d go with it because hey, a love story could start anywhere, could be anything, you only have to tell it right. You don’t want to miss anything, sometimes you want the world to turn to shit just so you can save it. Sometimes you feel sorry for murderers because it’s like homework, it all gets on top of you, it gets completely out of control and you panic, you try to cover yourself.  You’ve heard it’s the same with money; money and murder, you imagine a baliff at the door would be a lot like a body under the floor, that an angry letter, a bill on the doormat would be audible, would thump; the telltale debt.

You hate whispers, and flashing glances you don’t understand and friends. You have friends, a few, but you are as suspicious of their motives as they are of yours. You don’t seem to understand that friends last forever, like they do, you don’t even seem to hope. You have written them off as temporary, they have written you off as a joke, a poor investment. You want to write letters, and believe in true love, the sort that swallows your life from the edges to the insides, you haven’t thought about much else. You haven’t thought to leave room for much else.

You are fifteen and sometimes you think, perhaps Blake was mad. Sometimes it seems that Tolkein only wrote boys who hardly breathed but for each other and for war and for things without faces to fight and you know nothing of any of it. Sometimes it seems that way, sometimes you think like that, but you try not to.

I rinsed the dishes last night,
because it’s not, “the morning after” until you’re gone
and you haven’t left when I’m rinsing the dishes
with your words in my ear,
when, “You can’t leave the soap suds!”
is all I can hear,
with, “Not rinsing those dishes will give you diarrhea,”
- you know, you looked it up.
You can’t believe I’ve been washing up wrong
for years.

It’s not, “the morning after” until you’re gone,
so we had an evening four days long;
full of your name on my lips
and my hands on your hips
and whatever the opposite of an eclipse is.
A night that’s full of dawns;
A sixty eight hour afternoon,
with the fold out bed filling my tiny room
till it’s full of bed and your heart
through your chest pressed against my head
and I guess it went pretty well.

Because you left your clothes behind
and in their place took mine
and before I would have laughed at the idea;
sneered at such, intimacy?
Yeah, mutual clothing like a nod to shared nudity
but - you wore this shirt for two weeks straight.
And it stinks of you.
It makes me think of you.
Like the kitchen sink stinks of you
or, makes me think of you
I forget which one, it seems like
my olfactory senses are in my brain now
and you’ve caught the train home now
and it’s the morning after.

And what I’m trying to say is that
if this, is made up of us,
passing unwashed items of clothing
back and forth and me
doing the washing up properly -
If I’m left with an empty room
full of an empty bed
If I’m left with letters and words,
with all the things we’ve said -
if I’m left knowing, this weekend went well,
then I’m over the moon.

I’m so over the moon
Like the morning, done with the moon -
I’m over it, I’m into you
and it’s the morning after now
and who am I kidding, you’re the morning too.
A sunrise. Sixty eight hours through