Naively, I am really hoping she will know. It has been bugging me for a while, a year or so.
I ask Mami what the ex does with everything he knows about me now that he no longer needs it.
He Knows a lot, I tell her darkly. She looks taken aback.
What does he know? Her hands [...]

Her face between two vertical rust-flaked bars. She has been stuck there for a long time, head inside, the rest of her hanging uselessly from this insignificant height. (Standing next to me, she would be very small.) The very tips of her toes are her only unsteady anchor. Her hurting flailing envy gives way, after [...]

Snorkel and goggles in the bathtub.
Anything I let leave my hands crab-crawls sideways into an oblivious hole of mess. The shower head, when I turn the temperature right down, falls from where it hangs. I have several shower head shaped bruises. The bathroom lights take seven pulls of the light string before they flicker on, [...]

In a strange twist of events, my old best friend from high school will be living a thirty second walk from my front door as of tomorrow. We haven’t talked for years. The last time we did anything together as friends was for my sixteenth birthday, when we went to swoon over Dylan Moran performing [...]

I fall asleep with the radiator burning holes into my dreams and the word on my back. ‘Ordinaire‘ standing out in white cake-icing script on a black T-shirt. On the front it says ‘100% Extra…’ I pulled this T-shirt from my wardrobe with my eyes shut this morning. All day I have felt clingy eyes [...]

Len has a friend stay over. They shut themselves into his room and drink large glass bottles of lambrini obtained illegally from the guy at the market. At two am Len stumbles into me muttering unintelligibly. His friend hangs miserably over the sink.
Consumed not by guilt but swallowed almost whole, this morning, by his first [...]

This is where you have been.
Four white-washed corners of despair. One perfectly round hole set into the thick cast iron door. Sporadic flashes of eye at the hole from day number one. They are watching. You. Day number two. Press yourself into a corner. You think it is the least conspicuous of the four. You [...]

you were very loud
and I really like that.
Muffled static silence unnerves me. Unless I am there to see the muffles. Of your silence. Sheet gripped between teeth. Today I left a bite mark on my hand, imperfect and irregular and a beautiful purple.

You’re looking well, he says, looking me up and down.
Looking well, what does this mean? I decide this statement of his is loaded, long before he repeats himself once, twice. A sideways look of appraisal.
I tell him I slept four hours. When I woke, damp T-shirt and the hazy remainder of a dream ebbing and [...]

Last day in Dublin. Today I feel like the walking dead even after coffee in Bewley’s, where the Boomtown Rats met regularly, according to the glinting mosaic plaque above the door. I am very conscious of having my feet walk where James Joyces’ and Oscar Wilde’s once did.
Evensong at St. Patrick’s - I am mesmerised [...]