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. 

Hong Kong Time

Forgot about your seachange eyes. I was too busy looking everywhere else when I saw you last, transfixed by my increasingly bland drink, fascinated by my shoes, intrigued by the middle distance between us. Nonchalant even though I wanted to dive into them, gorge on them, fill my lungs with them. And when the time would come to surface, please fuck let it be never years from eternity, when they pull me from the mud of your hair and the rocky beach of your mouth, I'll have grown gills.

Leftovers

I'm eating a weird abandoned little rich girls’ dinner. Stale toasted bread with dip which still smells viable but shouldn’t be. My caloric intake today would probably make an African orphan cry (but they don’t make tears if they’re more than 10% dehydrated, you argue) but it’s ok so long as I’m skinnier than you.

Why is it so hot all the time

“Hot as.” “Yeah.” We melt through the city in an ill-conceived attempt to find a toaster. Doomed from when we got in the car; the tongue of your seatbelt branded into your chest; there was a scene. The aircon in your car is on annual leave (Prague, with regards) so I fan us with my mother's scented sandalwood. We’re listening to Tame Impala and though I pretend to hate them, you know I know all the words. Failing to find a parking spot in the multi storey we park your shitheap in a fifteen minute spot on Beaufort, later returning to find it bristling with so many tickets it looks alive. It’s summer in the city. There are goths suffering in summer leisure goth, which is the same all year round, juvies screaming past in cheap fluoro appaz totes magsy, a bum dying on the sidwalk outside Chanel from dehydration. I watch but don’t intervene as a western suburbs honey pauses to sprinkle him with perfume. We hit Myer and spend so long drifting like stunned flies in the aircon that eventually we are asked to leave and forget to buy a toaster.

I want a fucking baby

So you are leaving now. Maybe you will sit on the plane next to a fat man who apologetically belches and spills over into your seat like the wine from your glass, or a baby who pleasantly surprises you by sleeping all the way through to the refuelling in Hong Kong, as wizened and peaceful as a nut. Sadly they later wake up, look at you and howl mercilessly until their mother gags them with sugar. You wonder why they are crying so hard until you catch a glimpse of yourself in the window. You haven’t realised but when you kissed me for the last time I took a piece of you with me, it was your top lip (I was always fond of it) and your teeth gleam frighteningly in your mouth, like miscarried justice. Good thing you got travel insurance; did you read the fine print though?

Foxy Boxin

I was so excited about moving from my old townhouse into my new house. I could hear my neighbours’ every fart and footfall. They liked to watch movies about domestic violence in Fremantle late at night, at least, that’s what I tried to convince myself while I drooled into my pillow. I think my new house is haunted, or maybe they just hitched a ride in the move, with the linen. I don’t think the ghosts are malevolent. Or benevolent. They’re just ghosts. Occasionally I think I hear muffled heels doing the foxtrot down the hall on their way out, or low voices in laughter. They sound like my friends.