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[“Where were you when that memory came to mind? They call it a curative emotional release=text unavailable/Boundless and bound in the same gesture of time, and you reach for the glowing screen./The smell of red spilt wine on the worktop, and you think diesel. Smashed windscreen.”]
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[“Wire wrists=text unavailable/building strength until the dragging to the car/is child’s play”]

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OK, fine, let’s talk about it, let’s get straight to the point: you’re alone. But you’re not, you say, you’re here with them; “we’re heading out soon, actually”; you’re sharing an ice cream. OK, the point, the precipice, the fact is, I’m alone. How tasteless, to state it. Is this not the point of making us read all these pages? To make it sound more complicated? It’s hard enough to say that I force out another figure and another stream, digressing, all these sentences to say, to name it, the contemporary disease of loneliness. “Since 2008, a tripling of cases”. This isn’t a poem. Disenfranchisement, the loss of something. You’re losing, particles drifting. Dripping, your ice cream is melting. Sticky keys for a week, Honey, but you like to say, “I am invested in ‘What’s next?’, in, ‘the application of soft skills to hard challenges’.” It’s a sliding scale until you’re here, sorting baby pictures into me / not me / me / not me, ascertaining the shape of things.

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I don’t want to talk about it anymore. But I will say this: stay with me, stick with it.

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What is it you just read? Scroll back, I’ll say it again:

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I couldn’t stay here.