We dream in highways and landslides, miss the bus and walk the industrial zone, rusted barrels and weeds through the milk carbon whine of gutted machinery. I wear last decade’s dress, all black and splayed hollow; you, the ostentation of a formless pullover. You reach into your pocket — the last smoke before you quit, so you say — climb the graves of primary industry and exhale a microcosm of pitch.

We don’t speak for days. Years of wasting, ******* on churches, and the emptiness of night walks. I don’t *** because I hate endings and you depart to whatever next fix won’t sort you out. It’s a dreary waste of time and we both know it, but we move in circles before an abyss, growing wretched until nothing remains but traces of a vibrancy we’d never had.

After you depart, I mould myself a simulacrum of you. Time slows. I lose touch with my surroundings. Piles form. The imminent dissolves like sugar, like scent on the clothes you left. I find your pullover from months back and it clings like water. And it smells like negative space. And it covers me completely.