"I might not have been His most faithful of children, but I still believed in him and he still believes in me."





That was the last thing Meg said to me as she walked out the door of our apartment never to be seen again. She’d walked out on me just as she had walked in, on a note of a continued faith, ironic given that she was taking a big leap with me in the first place. I think on some level she knew that and she wanted the challenge. She didn’t know it, but it might never have been her challenge to have.





Being raised in a family as strictly as she had been, where the leather of the belt came as close as God Himself, her life has become pretty dull until she found me. That’s easy to say and might not be entirely accurate. For one of such faith, saying she had become jaded by it all I guess would be considered an understatement.





After she left, I did what I always do when something ended and that was to sleep. Maybe I’d wake up and it’d all be over all over again or it might just have kick started all over again. It would need a kick. I’d already had one. The reason she’d finally had enough was because I’d admitted that I was back on the hard stuff and for that I needed the sleep twice as badly since I’d been up for 48 hours combining work with pleasure, a deadline in which to return my story for the local paper of a young boy still missing after a year, the clues constantly mounting up and it just so happened that I slipped and partook in order to give me the edge I always wrote with, the one that got me there in the first place. The coke always gave me fire, the same fire I saw in Meg as she walked away.





It had been a hard year. Tonight was the first time I’d seen the fire that so many of her ex-boyfriends had told and in some cases warned me about. She was still friends with every last one of them since she was nineteen and a few of them had become my friends too, probably because we were all like clones who had the same look in our eyes. We’d all followed a distinct path that we hadn’t chosen and we’d all ended up going the wrong way home where she’d be waiting.





Meg was liberal, from the South and dressed conservatively, small patterned dresses fronted something bolder and hid something more complex, in the end leaving her looking more like the devil in disguise than an angel in hiding, which was, through the jealousy all the exes shared, the one thing we could all agree on. She was a contrast dulled by what could only be put down to the One who would never stop loving her, the One who hid inside the book she held under her arm as she walked in with a strut, the same book as disguised there as her own intentions. The gold gilding gave both of them away pretty quickly though. Much like the contents of that book, I didn’t believe her until I believed in her. Either way, me and all the others were all lost souls who she had chosen to find and she got everything from me she had hoped for and a little bit of everything she hadn’t. She hounded me every day this last few weeks, telling me how she could smell the drugs on me, that I had lost touch with her somehow before I finally cracked and told her that I’d fallen. I drifted away to sleep after a couple of minutes with the thought that I would partake again upon waking if nothing had changed.





Her phone rang and woke me a couple of hours later, the ringtone always startling, no matter what state you were in since she’d chosen The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash. In her anger she had forgotten to take it with her, though the name on the screen was surprisingly familiar as my best friend from back-in-the-day and fellow former naysayer of everything but the rock lit up her phone. Her and him has gotten to know each other the night that she came to the party where she found me, it just so happened that it was me that she took home and took under her wing but either way Gareth had his way of still making himself known and charming his way into your world whether you wanted him to or not.





"Hello?"





"Oh, hey Paul. Where’s Meg?", he asked after a long pause.





"I don’t know. She walked out on me, couple of hours ago. She’ll be back once she realises she’s forgotten this."





"Oh, well, okay. Cool, cool."





"Why are you calling her anyway? We haven’t talked for, what, three weeks?"





"Yeah…um, to be honest, I was looking for you. You didn’t answer your phone."





I pulled my phone from out of my back pocket with an achy trouble and checked it.





"You didn’t call me."





"Where are you?"





"Home."





"What’re you doing?"





"Sleeping."





"Phone was in your back pocket wasn’t it? Remember your ass cuts out reception because of the giant stick up there?"





I chuckle, I sigh and sit up. I turn on the TV and watch the news. There was the usual hysteria before something about our local cash-and-carry being robbed where me, Gareth and every other no-hoper or fall-out in our hometown would work before we either got out, fucked up and died or found we actually had a brain in our head.





"Bonanza’s got robbed again."





"I know, why do you think I’m calling…I was wondering how you did it without me."





We didn’t call ourselves drop-outs. We didn’t so much drop as fall, the resulting fallout diseasing everything around us. That’s just the kind of place we grew up in.





"You know me my friend, I work in mysterious ways. The big I am, much like the big I am in the sky."





"Still fucking with God?"





"More him fucking me lately."





"You back on the rock again?"





"Yeah."





"You can always hear it in your voice. S’the one thing more powerful than God."





I don’t comment. I refuse to agree with him because I know the place where he’s calling me from and because of my new-found faith as of a year ago Meg showed me the way out of there.





"On the one hand I’m sorry to hear that. On the other it’s a relief because of why I was trying to track you down."





"What do you want? I don’t have anything left but Him and he’s been fading this last couple of hours."





"Coke. To smoke. Rock and roll."





I tingled and rubbed my brow and felt how hot it was.





"What about Tricks?"





"Tricks got caught last month outside the Gardens. Can’t find or don’t trust anyone else except for your girl."





"She’s not my girl any more."





"You know what I mean. Your contact, your girl."





"Like I said before, I cut my ties."





"Don’t you have forgiveness?"





"Forgiveness for what?"





"For what those, you know, did unto you?"





"Not today."





"Come on Paul. I’m out."





So was I, or so I thought. But all I could do now with nothing else to replace any of what came today, was to find myself thinking about her, the girl with the pink hair and the green shorts. The one who worked in the oldest dive in the city, the one who only slept when the sun came up. The thought was more powerful than the thought of getting lit up so it could only be a gift from somewhere. It was a different life now but I had already made myself the statistic that Meg always told me I would never be so why not go that one step further away from the light?





"You with me Paul?"





I stood up and pulled up my trousers. I messed up my hair and fucked up the order.





‘Paul?’





"Outside the school, half an hour, ALL the cash up front."





Gareth made a kissing sound down the phone like he always did and the phone went dead. I messed my hair up a little more and changed into jeans. It had been a Sunday and the light grey church chinos didn’t seem appropriate any more. I rolled up my sleeves and pulled off the waistcoat. I left our apartment in the Quays and caught the tram, along the way passing by the church, turning my head the other way to look out over the water as it disappeared behind me. For a moment it felt good to be moving backwards. The tram was all but deserted at eleven at night on a Sunday heading into the city as was to be expected. No-one heading in at a time like this was going for good reasons, not a single one of them and their faces said exactly that. I recognised a few of them from another time but they were all sleeping or not quite of this world inside this boiling tin. It’s July and it’s been the hottest night of the year so far and a part of me wishes I was them. A part of me can still hear this thing Meg called God and that part of me wants to turn back. He was never fully in me in truth, only the highlights that Meg had scattered into me as I sat there in AA in a room full of strangers complaining about what happened to their lives while she held my hand. I’d stopped listening to the man at the front who constantly proclaimed how he was 28 years sober all because of the invisible man who had touched him. To me that just sounded like a crime. The only form of prophetic reasoning I needed was happening right there and then in that room with the dirty frosted windows dimming all that light, grey plaster walls and the doors that echoed of being kicked in time and time again, simply by her holding my hand and the current she had passing through to me, the one she called faith, the one I never thought she’d lose was the thing keeping me alive. I guess God was a cover while I could hold onto one of his disciples who might have never let go of me. Meg was a good one in every sense of the word. For a while there she was all I saw, but she didn’t have a beard or ride freely along on a cloud up in the sky smiling down on us and all the destruction we caused, it was just her. It would be easy for me to say how no-one needs a figure of their imagination in their lives controlling their ways, simply because I didn’t. I had her. What I almost missed was how she needed it and needed it more than she would ever need me or anyone else real for that matter. That’s what I liked about her; through her faith and the control that came with that she was the ultimate drifter through life, more than me and Gareth or any of our ‘friends’ ever could be, and how hard it was to fuck that up and yet how fragile the consequences were. Like us all, she came with her contradictions. Every facet of her life as we had come to know it told the few around her who actually cared to look that she wanted out as much as she wanted me and all the others in. I never realised until a few months before she left how when she sat in that dark room with me was how she’d seen it all before and heard it all herself so many times before. At our most open she would shrug away the contradictions that she had learned to love and at our most intimate she would tell me to fuck the devil out of her for all I was worth like no-one had been able before. That was the difference; she wanted it out of her like it hurt and the one I was on my way to see was fine with him where he was but it seemed equally important to them both. As the tram turned the corner and moved firmly out of sight of the apartment complex, the one where something now somewhere far away had given me a blessing, I thought about that worth of mine for the rest of the journey and for some time to come after.





The tram pulled up outside the school and Gareth stood there, looking frail and grey, ghoulish. I stepped off onto the platform and gave him a hug, full of bones and little else besides. We didn’t exchange pleasantries or friendly anecdotes, we simply exchanged apparatus. I half-heartedly handed him my bible and he handed me two fifty pound notes and I got back on the tram. He smiled at the simple sentiment, but I have no idea if he ever even opened the thing to find the note on how somewhere the world had broken and how I was giving him the book because I didn’t need it any more.





I exited the tram near town hall and walked over towards Great Northern where I knew I’d find her, the girl with the pink hair and the green shorts, who would right now be at her most awake and the most alive. I do know her name; she meant more to me than that. Catalina always told me that she wasn’t as special as I made her out to be and I always told her how she should let me be the judge of that, even in the rare occasion when I saw her in the cold light of day, when the comedown was hard and through my dead eyes she looked all the more beautiful for it. But the spirit that came with her, that haunted her, the one that told me that even at twenty-two years old, she has seen everything I could ever hope and maybe, just maybe, a little more than that. There was a time when I could see her, much like Meg but less biblically. It was so far from biblical, she might as well have been hell-risen. The ever changing hair colour but the face that always remained the same, the one that you could sink into and fall back on more than any book written by man or by God himself.





I turned the last corner and there she stood handing out flyers for the big night, or that’s the way she always made it seem and all the drunken and broken men and women took her for her word and nothing else mattered, like she always had. She always had that effect on people, like she always had, it didn’t matter who you were. I just watched her from the corner for a while like old times, listening at a distance to the rock bars echoing down the alley from behind much like a year ago when the flavour of the month was Seether and The Killers. I’d stand here and score and talk to Tricks while I watched her do what she did. She looked exactly the same as she did when I first saw her there except for the hair. When she was in my life, her hair was purple and then red for a while before she found her palette resting elsewhere. She was like that. Unlike Meg, she didn’t keep ties, she didn’t tie up the loose ends and she didn’t settle. One day I stumbled off that corner, finally plucking up the courage to talk to her for a while about her night-time troubles before asking her where she was going when the night was over, like some scared kid at fourteen. When she replied she was going to sleep I invited her over and somehow the night looked better for it and the weeks that followed that finally felt good again. I was out on the street avoiding what I sought and craved but searching for what I wanted and what I wanted as it turned out was her. She couldn’t know I was just another fallout. She kept turning up at my doorstep at 4am after her shift and the rest is all a blur. She was no cure but she knew how to keep that one particular demon at bay, at least while ever she was around and I hadn’t stirred up some of her own. All I know is that one day as I lit up and scorched the spoon from under in the bathroom where I’d gone to hide from the shame, I hit it and looked up in the mirror in front of me and saw nothing but a distorted yellow phantom looking back before she moved into view to brush her teeth and that was it. In that moment when my heart stopped, she was burnt into my mind forever. I was in deep in so many ways and I fell for her too and it’s hard enough battling one relationship, let alone two. She put her hand on my waist and her smile had told me how I had nothing to fear but the evils of the love I already had, the one I had hidden myself away because of and nothing else from the love I had found.





"Miss Tolls" I repeated two or three times from the corner. She hadn’t heard me the first time because I’d all but whispered it.





Catalina looked around and eventually met my eyes. Her smile grew as if nothing had changed, as if she’d seen the friendly ghost she always had. She turned and walked over, tentative, slow-like as if making sure it was actually who she thought it was.





"Paulie?"





"The very same." I said, beaming back.





She jogged over and put her arms around me, pushing her flyers into the base of my spine. She’s nearly a foot shorter than me and her hair bounced up next to my nose, the smell of smoke taking my breath, the aura of 4am in the summer on my balcony filling me up, one of the few smells that lingered around me that made me feel something beyond how controlled I had become. I put my arms around her and felt her bones much like Gareth’s, but healthy with life, her only vice still the work she did that kept her from eating and the corkscrews of her hair irritating my knuckles. But I didn’t care. She kept a grip of me and I kept a grip of her and I could feel myself becoming honest and coming alive without the need of an outside force.





"The last time I saw you…you came out of that big glass building up near the Quays and you ignored me."





I stood frozen but didn’t lose my grip. It was one of those morning where there’d already been too much drama inside a glass house though no-one had any stones to throw. I’d seen her stood at the bus stop outside church waiting for the 23 back home one Sunday morning. I’d left church that day a little earlier because Meg was sick from the week before. Truth is that she’d miscarried on the Wednesday but we didn’t talk about that around those parts. That was half the problem and after that we didn’t talk about very much at all. She’d broken down while the Father talked about the Holy Son and I’d heard her sobbing and started walking her down the middle path while the others looked on proudly like her crying made her faith all the stronger when the fact was that it was breaking further. I helped guide her down the steps, the faded spotted print blouse crinkling in my hands whenever I started to lose grip, her eyes never leaving the ground. Cat spotted me and waved and I looked away pretending I’d not seen her but out of the corner of my eye I could see the candy-floss pink frizz and the cloud of smoke around her, everything else black suede, faux leather and a glimpse of the Kurt Geiger’s she always wore so well that made her look a thousand feet tall. I had missed that smell but as it settled into the senses it came with something harsher coming out of me. I don’t know what it was, if it was shame or self-righteousness. Either way it wasn’t right and she didn’t deserve to not be seen even though she probably just discounted it as soon as she put her hand down or so I’d thought.





"Yes, I did. I’m sorry. That was stupid of me."





"How could you?", she said tittering, slowly releasing me from her grip.





I smiled and didn’t respond. I was happy to see her and despite how I had turned away from her before, how we’d both turned away from each other, it was good to see her and to see her so happy to see me. She tilted her head and looked up at me with a little look of concern.





"You okay?"





I nodded.





"I’ve been better."





She nodded her expression remaining the same, looking back towards Deansgate’s foot traffic.





"I’m working so I can’t stay but what do you need?"





Strangely I hadn’t thought about an answer to the one question she might ask me. I didn’t know what to expect from her; I didn’t know if she was going to be angry at the sight of me there or if she’d ignore me completely but the one thing I didn’t expect was her eyes to still pierce me in the way they did when she asked me something, like they always did. I was nearly ten years older than her but Catalina has one of those minds that came up with the most incredible metaphors for even the smallest things in life, like emptying the bins in the club where she worked but with that a fierce and terrifying intelligence so sharp it cut your throat leaving you unable to speak. She kept staring at me not realising how I was bleeding in front of her, like the day she told me that she wouldn’t be coming around at 4am any more and I couldn’t say anything to change her mind.





"When do you go on break?"





"I don’t. You know that."





"Yeah, shit.", I said looking around edgily at the people walking by. "Gareth needs some rock."





"Gareth?"





"Yeah, Gareth."





"You burning up again?"





I close my eyes and sighed. My forehead was on fire.





"I’m back here but…not there."





"Not yet."





I nodded and looked in the window of Forsyth music store across the road at this green Fender. Meg had seen me play a few nights before she met me at Band on the Wall with some of my friends, barely a band, more a cacophony of damaged instruments. She got to know me quick and was very blunt in telling me on her sofa that she’d seen heathens before and while they come in all forms, there was none more cliché than one wielding an axe. That and a coke habit. That always made me laugh but barely raised a smile now. A sentence later she was telling me about how most heathens turned to devils and very rarely did they turn their back to the dark corners of the city that made them. I kissed her for the first time and told her that I could only try not to. She kissed me back and told me that she could see the quandary faced in Eden and how she’d take the apple under the condition it wouldn’t rot. When I think back now to when she said things like that, it pissed me off but at the time it seemed incredibly sexy. Sadly it would seem that even a place as frozen as it felt now wasn’t going to stop me from rotting any more. I shivered at the thought despite the intense heat all around and handed Cat the money.





"Give me half an hour."





I smiled again and headed off towards the city to clear my head.





"Paulie?"





I turned back around and struggled to focus under the purple light of the club next door.





"The Rice Bar in half an hour. I’ve got a little time." Cat said, her head tilting attentively again before turning back to the road.





I smiled and the first layer of ice melted a little. I didn’t look back though I could feel her eyes on me. I headed up Deansgate, avoiding the pricks that reside in the expensive-champagne bars and the tacky bars that have no personality and promo girls for miles. They hand me leaflets and flash their unnaturally white teeth towards me and I stumble past them and turn the corner to Market Street looking for a bench and a few seconds to settle. Walking this way always reminded me of Guy Fawkes night from a year ago when Cat didn’t so much as break my heart but fill it up a little more and it felt like it might explode but it was never loud enough to break above any firework in the sky that night. Tonight I needed a little time to catch myself. The rain had scattered all over the ground and was hitting the tiles like sparklers in November albeit in the middle of Summer. I’m not going to say that it wasn’t welcome because it was.





I settled down and rubbed my head in my hands, the light mist falling cooling me down, I sighed quietly into the air. I didn’t feel right again but that seemed to be the meaning to all this and it always had. Maybe Meg had been right about us fallouts and how we couldn’t change but no-one had ever asked me to and no-one had ever judged me for what I was, except for me. If there was one thing I had going for me it was that I had after quite some time convinced myself that there was nothing wrong with being a fallout and like most people who find a higher power after a prolonged absence, it’s only because of an inner shame and an inner shame alone that I’d continue to be my own judge. The difference this time was that I’d have no-one else to tell me otherwise or convince me of the good in me. Cat always offered a confidence that was as distant as it was close to your soul. A couple of weeks after we first met she told me that ‘Art wasn’t in the invisible, it was inside the real because the real is all you can really trust.’. I sat there and laughed at the thought of it, not because she just kept surprising me with what she’d say but mainly because of where I’d been, what I’d seen and not seen since.





The rain fell a little harder and I faced the floor, the only part of me that didn’t get generously soaked was my feet, the one part of me that always used to get drenched when I walked down here at this time of the night some time before. I looked down Market Street from my bench, an expansive and never ending street and I burned up while I waited for something to happen, something else to enter my mind but Cat, Meg and crack or at the least for half an hour to pass. I’d walked the length of the street countless times, drunk, sober, high and low, sometimes all four across the full stretch of the street, the light of day and the dusk. It was the weariness of walking the full length that eventually lead to Cat’s step outside of Great Northern that had made me even walk up to her in the first place, high, drunk and whatever else I was.





Market Street’s no Yellow Brick Road and I’m no tin man or lion but I got to the end and found a part of life I’d been seeking for quite some time, one that on some level might just offer me a way out on my own terms. All mine, no-one else’s. It’s sad to say that sometimes the easier option, the one where love comes as an automatic safety bridge to another part of life is all the less satisfying and all the more numbing.





The rain stopped and the paving in front of the shopping centre glimmered undisturbed now the sparklers were finally out. My head returned to the heat and I walked soggily back to where I’d already been, feeling luke-warm for it but alive. When I reached the Rice Bar, the server was already mopping the floor and tried to indicate to me how he was closing. Despondent, I turned to the door just before I saw Cat sat in the corner waving me over with the smile that was hers and hers alone, the one with the all familiar head tilt. The Chinese server recognised her acknowledgement of me and almost apologised as if to say that a very important person was waiting for me in the corner. To me there was. He moved his mop to one side and I walked gently across the shimmering floor, the lights of the cheap looking, flora-upholstered booths seemingly turning off one by one behind me slowly and with a flicker.





"Are you eating?" she asked.





"Not tonight."





"You look like you need it."





"Not tonight."





She sighed and laughed under her breath.





"You’re skinnier than before. That’s saying something.", I noticed.





"What’s it saying?", she says smiling, finishing off biting her nails.





"I don’t know. But you know me, it worries me…and I know I never had the right to worry."





"No, you didn’t", she said looking at me out of the tops of her eyes while she finished off some cold chow mein. "But I’ll let it pass." she finished as she sucked in what remained.





I chuckled at her bossiness. I always let her like I hadn’t let others do but she had a power on me that I don’t think she ever knew that she had. But then there was always a part of me, particularly in the months that followed her leaving that believed that she did. She chuckled back and some mein fell down onto the black surface below barely missing the plate.





"If only you had as much control over your mouth as you do your tongue, Miss Tolls."





She continued laughing and choking slightly on her food, scooping up the rest from the table and into her mouth. The server looked over and rolled his eyes. She took a breath and composed herself.





"Nothing changes. Well, some things do.", putting her fork back to her mouth.





"But nothing that matters, am I right?"





She stopped and put the fork back on her plate and tilted her head towards me.





"You remembered.", she said smiling back at me.





Cat always seemed like she was there but there was always a part of her that had never moved from what really mattered to her, things I never really understood. There was a boy out there somewhere who she fell for at 15 years old and who she still saw from time to time, a boy who didn’t know what he wanted, much like he didn’t when he was 15. He changed near constantly or so she used to tell me and then one day I blurted out the only semi-prophetic phrase that would come to define us in that short time we were together, at least in my head, that I probably stole from somewhere.





"Nothing changes but things that really matter. They have to or else they’d stop mattering."





She knew in that moment I understood and just like she’d looked into my eyes that night in the bathroom and told me that it was okay to keep on falling. I’d returned the sentiment in a way that she could understand. Much like the weeks that followed them, we talked until we couldn’t talk any more and my mind had the distraction it needed from the most recent of the fallouts and the coke, the coke that she held somewhere under the jacket I was increasingly wanting to get under with my own hands, though not for what she held under there, but for her and everything she contained.





"Remember that first night we spent together?"





"Yeah,", she said looking down and to her right, seemingly looking at her sideways smile.





"Remember what we did?"





"We made popcorn and then we slept.", she said playing with her chopsticks.





"In a year, I haven’t slept like I slept that night. In all this time that was the best first night I’ve ever spent", I said joining her in my own sideways smile.





"Yeah?"





"Yeah."





She nodded and continued looking down, her eyes flashing up in the direction of mine but barely focusing.





"That was a long time ago."





"It was one year and three days ago."





"The sun had come up before we had the chance to do anything else. You know me and sleep."





I looked out of the window at the people rushing by, underdressed and under their umbrellas, either bar hopping or giving up on the night altogether and I felt warm inside. Cat looked up and saw the server indicating towards her, presumably that he wanted to close up for the night. It meant more because I knew that would mean that when she was back out in the open air of the night that she my chance to talk to her, to see further sense would be gone and I’d be back into the unknown. She started rustling around in her bag to apply another layer of mascara over her lashes to replace the one that the rain had washed off when it dripped down over her face and a comb to unlock the curls that grew ever bigger despite them being so weighed down.





"Cat."





"Paulie", she said smiling.





I looked back at her closely to make sense of the words I wanted to push out of me, just like I had that night one year and three days ago.





"Why’d you call it off?"





That’s when she looked at me like she was expecting a question from the other side of the spectrum, which was what was supposed to come out of me.





"Because I had to."





"You had to?"





"Yeah."





"Why…You had to?"





"Yeah. Because I couldn’t give you what you wanted."





"You never even asked."





"I knew. I didn’t have enough in me to be the person like you ended up with, someone who’d tell you about the good in you that you could never see."





"That’s exactly what I didn’t need. That’s what lead me back here."





She paused and pulled her bag back up onto her shoulder.





"She didn’t offer me anything. But something that I couldn’t see."





She pierced me hard before she looked to the ground.





"That’s the coke talking."





I shook my head but couldn’t focus.





"I didn’t hit it. She just thought I did."





Much like a year ago I couldn’t look at her for fear of what would come out of her mouth and right now she could either walk out of the door and it wouldn’t need to be faced again, at least not in any kind of material way, only disguised underneath the hurt that would follow after the next real fallout or she could simply talk. But one way or another, my mind was going to be blown.





"I’ve been fucked around enough, Paulie."





"I know."





"I’ve been fucked around more than you think. It’s not easy to learn that you fucked with yourself and you trip yourself up over and over again. It’s the worst kind of hurt."





I nodded and I waited while the server flicked more light switches off and only reflections remained.





"It took me a couple of weeks of standing out there on that street to realise that I was going in more circles than you were and how much I hoped someone might tell me that one day. That I was the mistaken one."





She handed me a small bag containing Gareth’s rock. She dropped it against the table top ahead of my catching it between my fingers.





"Here. I’m really sorry."





I looked at the bag, noticing the powder against the contrast of the faux carbonite table. She walked towards the door and passed by the server who bowed as she left as if she was the queen she really was.





"Cat."





I hadn’t whispered this time. I heard her Geigers stop on the still moist floor and shuffle around and squeak though my back was turned to her.





"What time do you finish?"





"3.30am. You know that."





"I’ve arranged to meet Gareth at 3am down at the bus stop, you know, the one outside the church where you saw me."





It was the only lie I told her that night.





"Want to come over at 4?"





I don’t look back and I listen to the hum of the ovens in the kitchen shutting down, the remaining lights fizzling and the silence coming from her.





"Have you changed?"





"Yes. But only where it matters."





The door opened and the city jumped inside of us. I’d missed her.





"If you go into the bathroom for any longer than two minutes, I’m not coming in there again."





I laugh gently and feel her smile spread across her face. The next thing I heard was the door slowly closing, the rush of the returning rain, the lengthy buzz of the traffic and the door closing again to nothing. I keep laughing like I haven’t done for a year and three days.