She is the pink of bright lights in a small space throbbing with that electronic rubbish that no one really listens to but they play incessantly in clubs that leaves you dazed and in want of a date with Earl Grey and a lazy boy, a quiet melody humming listlessly in the background.

Am I meant to be carefree or kind? Loving or beloved?

having needed something to calm himself, frigid, afternoon-dreaming of legs tangled into his own

It was the whole night, though, as he sat and stared vacantly down, while the moon tumbled through the navy, blotched sky and disappeared under the blanket of the vast olive groves to the east.

But he’d never had Death tap on his shoulder and ask him, are you ready to go gently into that good night?

When I was thirteen and she twenty-six, when I was still riding the bus to school and she selling prescription painkillers, Brittany was murdered during a drug raid in my hometown.