Smile High Club

I met Jai when he pulled me out of a pool of my own vomit three years ago at a house party in Nedlands. I’d been going through a phase where I would pilfer my Mum’s painkillers and kiss the ugliest boys I could find. I'd spend the mornings after watching myself unravel in reverse through my friend's bemused recollections of me threatening to fuck the sadness out of them, hospital records and the baleful lens of social media. Obviously, I immediately fell in love with him as I did with any boy who rescued me from myself and we spent months playing an elaborate game of sex chicken, which neither of us won in the end.

Housemate Wanted

So the year smiles on. The pipes sing when you twist the shower taps off, laughing to yourself. You dry yourself ecstatically, relishing the fluffiness of the borrowed towel, and you hang it up to dry carefully, not concertinaed, because your mother taught you well. 

Swishing out in your dirty white pants, you stand in the hallway a moment trying to gauge the situation. Your brother's girlfriend vibrates between kettle and fridge, offering tea with milk and sugar or honey or black if you prefer sweetheart and you wish she’d chill the fuck out because it makes the white noise in your head turn itself up to ten and fuzz out when you smell her fear. You can’t work out what she’s scared of, you thought you’d conducted yourself with reasonable decorum and had only caught yourself giggling about the full battery on your phone about five times. Full battery, you’d sniggered. FULL BATTERY FULL BATTTTERR-Y. 

The day had not been the success you’d hoped for.