The painful places, you always try to hold It’s Such A muted relief, You have to convince yourself That It’s Working. I spread Each One Of My Fingers over Each One Of My Ribs So my hands Can wear them Like Gloves- -they stay there so long, when i look down i think they’ve burst through the skin. it reduces Or increases? the pain to a Dull Ache and I forget about the pain the way a mother forgets about labour I have more moments She has more babies

Tiny traumas to the chest wall, That’s what causes it- So every Time You Cough, Or Curse, Your body remembers when you forget. We aren’t bothered If the things We do Are Detrimental, We just have to see the Smoke Enter The Air To Know We Can Breathe. Smoking might kill you But it might show you you’re Alive! Tiny traumas, Like the batting Of Butterfly Wings In your chest, If you get enough, It might feel like A Brick To The Lungs. Tiny traumas, Like the Butterfly Effect- I once knew a girl who plucked the wings from ladybirds for fun, What happens to empty bodies?

The echoes of my hallowed bones and that ringing of old aches. I felt death coming, it felt a lot like euphoria; everything you wanted comes all at once. The room for resurrection gets smaller and smaller; the space between you and the end grows close. When it happens, it’s bare feet and the cold. The way life wains thin and gaunt. When blackbirds fly above you, you think they are flecks of a fire - you wonder if you’ll be burned. The ground is smoother than any bed you’ve had in your entire life because you can watch the earth move from the roots. You watch love happen a thousand times and you remember that possibility is not a promise. I wondered if I had died before, because the burial felt awfully familiar.

A girl I’m half in love with said she can’t get out of herself. She swigs cherry coke and turns to me - ‘it’s like my flesh is walls, you know, like it’s inescapable - but profound, you know?’ I begin to think it isn’t cherry in the Coke. I understood what she meant though so I said, ‘yeah that feeling when your skin feels like it’s shrinking and it’s like you’re watching the world happen to you - this is your life and it looks wonderful but you’re not in it. You’re a bystander.’ I remember she let me try some of her drink when it came to the table and it definitely wasn’t cherry. ‘Not that-‘ ‘What is the mixer in your drink?’ ‘It’s more like - oh vodka - it’s more like the world is reflecting off of you and you’re like a mirror for the world and it feels fucking weird.’ ‘I thought you weren’t drinking tonight - and isn’t that just politics?’ ‘Well I’m large, I contain multitudes’ ‘Did I just solve capitalism?’ ‘No you just necked half my drink - go get me a new one.’ And we laughed the kind of laugh that other people envied. We were academic rivals for a long time, which was hot, naturally. I was amazed by her in the typical way; that sense of eternity that people have about them and the crippling fear that they’ll fade away. She did, she does, we’ll get to that. ‘What’d you get?’ She turns to me, our chairs back to back. ‘A+,’ I will be completely normal about the smell of her perfume that follows her as she turns like the ocean and the forest and th….. ‘And you?’ Pull yourself together. ‘Sames,’ and she doesn’t smile. I don’t think you can call it that. She sort of sits in the moment, maybe content, though you can’t discern much at all from that look. It lasts. That’s all I knew. ‘Which one of us is the manic pixie dream in this situation so you think?’ I think about how much i love her and I worry that this is because she smells like a waterfall in a meadow in the Garden of Eden or something ridiculous. She turns to me then and I realise that love has a look about it and it was all over my face. Quite alarming. I let my eyes swim back up out of the annoyingly profound depths they had travelled to in her face and I form a totally natural response. ‘Well they always die in the end, don’t they?’ Nailed it. ‘They absolutely do.’ And it was okay that I just said something annoyingly cynical because she laughed and wars never happened. As she kisses me I wonder if she is saying goodbye. The thing about kisses is that they are a really nice way to say I love you but also I’ll never see you again. Take this with you. She got a job in Somerset; a pretty little village job with bookshops and annoyingly beautiful scenery which was far more compelling than me. She was never my girlfriend; she did things because they were pretty things to do. I think. She kissed me because it was a pretty thing to do. So as she sits across from me, I understand no more than I did a decade ago. I married Harry, my first boyfriend whose kisses didn’t taste of anything. She never married, at least not yet. I think she liked the grey area. I think she didn’t like commitment. She’s working on a screenplay about grief and I hope she misses me. I think I’m a shit person. She smiles up at me, occasionally, her glance hasn’t changed for ten years, sips some tea, and places it back in the saucer. I want to say I like her perfume but I think I might cry. I think I might cry right here in this cafe and I know why we came here to work because it’s beautiful and it’s Somerset and she was right to stay here. I convinced Harry to move. She asks if we are still on for collaborating on some writing together and I give her the rest of my brownie. I feel the scratchings of possibility once again and decide that it has to mean friendship. ‘Absolutely,’ I say, and she eats.

I still have the ballerina body; that harrowed silhouette with all the bruises, like cigarette burns in a carpet when the ash drops off. Carrie bit into a strawberry the size of her palm and didn’t pull away until her teeth had bitten right into the vein of it. At the centre, she ripped away and i almost expected blood, but it was clean. As her hand grew stickier she threw the carcass of it onto her plate. This reminded me of a cat eating a mouse and pawing away it’s head. I don’t hate food but I do feel a little indifferent. My skin itches in restaurants and when other people talk about dinner plans I feel a hotness flushing at the back of my neck - what’s the opposite of arousal? In my cheeks and I can almost hear whisperings of someone in the redness. There’s a mourning about my body. A definite grief. In moments of hunger you can hear the echoes of missed meals rippling through my stomach. I feed her now. She doesn’t accept. There’s a grief about me so that I have a slight feeling she is punishing me. I always feel a little too empty and a little too sick. There’s a shallowness to it, a coldness to my body that with reflection, I think can only be described as memory. She remembers what I put her through and so she won’t let me grow. My father tells me I’m too thin and somehow that doesn’t feel like a good thing - i think that’s growth? My sister said it got easier to eat in front of her boyfriend once they’d fucked. Then she fell in love. I don’t know what to do with that but it’s in my head a lot. For a while i used to see which boys i liked by the ones i couldn’t eat around. I wonder how many girls mistook fear for love; all those butterflies in your stomach batting to get out of their empty cage. I like the richness of food. I like the smell of it and the hedonism of it but also the health and necessity of it. I like the sociability of food, the consensus of hunger. It was a newness to eat something and keep it in. Today I ate chocolate and never reached back down for it. I worked on my assignment in the library today. Me and my friends sat in a 16:34pm sort of slumber with bright laptop screens and the hot library; the piercing cold outside had flushed our cheeks. There was a mess in front of us of paper and wrappers and coffee cups, all of it deliciously used and emptied. But us, full. Happy. Tired from the work not from the hunger. Frankie broke off a scarily massive chunk of dairy milk and put it in my palm, fairly consciously but quite automatically. It felt like an incubus. Weighty. Unnecessary. And yet, I ate it. That’s it, that’s all that happened today. I ate and everything stayed the same.

The veil of a life we were living, Had begun to fall away. Though you wanted me no longer, I wanted you to stay. Quickening Rhythms Of heartbeats and Memories, I wonder how long it will take You To forget Me. Like tombstones and memorials I’ll carve your name Into my life, Maybe I can make you stay. Leave me alone You say and So of course I go Because where once there was a Softness, Now all had turned to stone.

i think she’s scared of me. you know? those thick smiles pulsing with teeth eager and willing. too much? she uses my toothbrush it’s nice to share my mouth wash oozed into the cut in her lip from my teeth. by the bed i lay a ring o’ roses and let you sleep where i lay. you woke mid - night laboured eyes and body dripping out of the bed you stretched and exorcised some nightmare. it wasn’t fear but a candle still lit we leave so many things untouched. you stand and wait for what? shaky hands clasp the glass jar and drink. it was black cherry scent or flavour? you drank the wax and lit a match on your top lip but you didn’t burn you choked. when i couldn’t hear your voice anymore you gave one hopeless glance at my ceiling and melted into my floor. i think i loved you so fiercely you burned. there’s cherry wax in the carpet it’s swimming in your ashes. i love you i love you mould into something new.

‘I’m becoming a building’, she said, and turned to me as though it would make sense in my mouth. The words echoed in the distance between us. She pulled away, slowly, moulding to the air behind her. I wondered if my hands were holding a pair of strings rather than a spine. ‘I’m sorry?’ This all felt very slow, sort of like lofi pop in a dusky foggy nightmarish room you can’t pull yourself out of - and you just seem to stretch out for the door but get no further - for the rest of time. ‘I’m serious,’ and she laughed then, but more like choking. Her voice grew thick like it was full with pools of moss. Grey green, if a cough were a colour. Time seemed to move faster though, after this interlude, but she did not return to me. Instead she moved in orbitals around small things in the room; an apple on a book, a plant on the bookcase (as she bit into the apple), a clock on the desk (as she watered the plant). I wondered if she was always rushing. ‘My veins are getting bigger,’ she said in a mouthful of apple tissue and juice, ‘they are like dilating and it hurts. Feels like they’re gonna burst or something’. ‘Omg that sounds awful - can I help at all? The look she gave me I can only describe as a cloud settling before the rain comes. Expected, sunken and blue. She did look blue, which I hadn’t noticed before. I moved closer to the desk from behind which she had melted into a chair. ‘I feel a bit like those old mossy churches. They’re a bit dilapidated and there’s nothing you can do because no one has the money for forgotten buildings but everyone kind of likes it that way you know? Half done,’ she said as she spun once in one complete circle on the chair. slowly. rhythmically. predictably. ‘You kind of forget they are there,’ she continued, ‘they blend in with the sky in some horrible aura reminding you of concepts you can’t understand and then you touch them by accident almost. It’s a building and you couldn’t see it. It’s grey and fading. That’s atrophy that is - buildings are the same as bodies.’ Naturally, I hadn’t thought she was right until she died and I understood why they called it ‘stone - cold’ death.