content warning: references to alcohol, drugs, mental illness

Stepping on possum shit in my backyard under a midnight moon,
I smoke a cone, she naps in my bed.
She puts on my t-shirt so she doesn’t smell like bong water
on her way back home.
We are in love but I am not satiated.

Hearts so full, fingers interlaced. It is Halloween,
spent on sandy sheets with socked feet—dampened, dangling.
We smell like gin, petty crime and speed walking up Brunswick Street,
the cologne of our Uber driver.

This chalice is half full—
a diet alter ego, Coke Zero of sorts is fronting,
it is on the tip of my snowflake tongue. Saccharine, semi-hydrating,
she doesn’t drink soda.

A scratchy top with a hole in the sleeve
that only just fits her is passed onto me.
Cobwebbed black lace, dug out from the depths of gentrified discounts.
It is soaked in cheap perfume and all-natural deodorant that does not work.

Intensity and lustful friendship, going to Thursgays to eat gozlemes in boob tubes.
Seeing some radio-friendly indie band live.
Forgotten texts on early mornings,
we get day-after-drinking shits.

We move in together and she spills shiraz on the carpet trying to impress a boy.
I scrub the shag carpet, bent knees stained red.
She gets the room with the wardrobe I could live in and a balcony,
and I drop a shameful cone piece off it at our housewarming.

Her best friend called Kensington the ghetto and
I don’t know how I feel about a white boy saying that.
She says she hates it in this house, in this lockdown.
Outpouring of tears, mental illness. It smells like teen spirit and depression.

Cat piss wafts through narrow corridors onto unmade beds, mildewy carpets.
She eats pasta naked in her new bed and I put the dish in the sink,
romanticise our lives on Instagram while we drift apart,
cry into her shoulder, ask for a hug and never speak again.
We were in love. At least I was.