We first fell into each other when we were still small time, still ate stale toast for dinner and had to share rent with four or five other seedy folks. We didn’t know each other past our names and skins back then, but so we could pay our respective rents the next day we split a bottle of whiskey and drank all night. Why? A mate of ours had got shot and we were young enough to still care that we might very well be next. The gum tree leaves still smelled hot. Summer is a melting season here.
These days we don’t worry, because we realised that the worry would **** us worse than a bullet or an electric chair or an overdose.
But back then we reminisced on good old days that weren’t so old, and lessons learnt that we would not fully understand until years later. We spoke of experience, though we had none, and it seemed so simple when you kissed me and it was alright because it was only skin, only experience.
Years later when we were reminiscing on that, laughing at our younger selves, I admitted that that had been my first time, sleeping with a boy like that. You’d been shocked, and apologised because you’d done it and not done it gently, and you hadn’t loved me...
and you say you’re not a romantic ******* but I know you only act out of love, necessity, and revenge. These are the engines that drive you forward into the world. You may not have loved me then, but you needed me, and I had wanted you.
But we weren’t a thing – you didn’t love me, after all – but we worked together more often. We grew calluses on our hands together, ran in the night together, laughed and choked out adrenaline together.
I think we got too carried away – were we intoxicated by sunburnt skin and dried sea salt and long hair?
I think I was, because one night you had to stitch a knife wound in my thigh with murmuring concentration and I joked you could be a beautiful nurse and you threatened to knife me somewhere more sensitive while still threading the needle with precise care, while dried blood flecked your knuckles.
That’s when I got out of the game for a while, got a ‘real job’ – parents couldn’t be proud because that’s what they’d thought all along.
You didn’t seem pleased and I told myself it was because you missed me. Because no one worked the midnight silent districts like we did, no one ruled the bone grey estates like we did. No one mimicked a redback spider like we did.
And so you left, perhaps to find a different kingdom to conquer, one with more history and memories. Maybe you wanted to paint a new memory onto something, to show you were there. You said you were taking a ghost home, something you’d met in a forest on a Sabbath and who lived far away and you showed me a ring and said the ghost couldn’t go farther than the sound of the gold.
You’re always making up ******* like that, trying to put magic into the world,
When all you really need to do is be there.
So I worked an office job I hated from the beginning. The shirt collar too stiff, the paper cuts didn’t hurt enough, I cycled through memos and files and emails and reports on accounts, profits, billable hours. I slept with women, with men, but none of them make me feel like I’m bleeding out, not like you did, like I was on the knife edge of heaven with you gripping my hips hard enough to bruise so I wouldn’t fall off.
I would pay your rent if you only came home and made me laugh.
And maybe you hear me, from wherever you are, because you come back, in the night like a prophecy.
You show off photographs, a music box, a fresh bullet wound and a broken toe. I kiss you better and you don’t say that you missed me, you don’t say you love me, but I can feel it in your hands. They tremble.
You say you’ve found a job for us, a good one, and I say yes and don’t go in to work the next day.
After that we can afford a penthouse, so we do. But it makes us want to jump out of the windows. We buy a cat but it runs away. You ask me if I want to run away and I say yes. I always say yes to you.
So we pack up our guns, our skins, our names and go.
This is the sunset we drive into, this is the sun that we burn in.