The fingertips of my right hand fidget along the ridges of my thigh and my left arm wraps between the bars of my ribcage.Nothing she says is able to make it’s way into my brain, each word blurs together into a cloddy cacophony as it hits my eardrums which isn’t uncommon these days. I sometimes feel that my eardrums have curled in like earwigs or shrivelled to pink pipes in a way that leaves me unable to hear even my own thoughts. But I can feel her voice through my skeleton and the breathy melancholy of it stirrs my entire body. I am overwhelmed with a desperate desire to encase her body with every scrap of my frail frame. There’s a longing that was never there before for there to be more of me to shield her from the muffled noises of cars that spill in with the pricking frost from the far window. I offer up a hand which she doesn’t take it so it shivers there on the edge of the velvet sofa like a white mouse spotted with mottled beigeish freckles.