God, he says, the shadow of his fist obscuring my notes, I’m bored.
He sits down before he asks if I want company. He is doing everything backwards. Even in today’s sun he’s wearing his shin-length leather coat. When he takes it off I see he’s shrouded in black.
He tells me how great A Clockwork [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

(I am in Dublin. This post is being typed on the world’s slowest computer.)
For breakfast Elisabeth and I contemplate the shrink-wrapped black plastic box of take-away sushi which she placed carefully underneath the bunk bed last night. It looks sweaty, the tuna a deeper shade of grey today, so we head to the Fresh Food [...]

Today was the first day of real spring weather.
Chrisie and I sat on our sun-warmed doorstep and talked about her boyfriend. He interjects crikey into every other sentence. He also says happy days a lot, wistfully, as if he were on death’s doorstep with a head full of nostalgia. Whenever he says this, I suppress [...]

We create an open-air anthropomorphic drama, where we direct and interpret and say this way that way and play audience all at once, where our causal agents walk bow-legged with six spread toes, frequently defying gravity with a sound that drops the centre of my stomach somewhere half-way between my disobedient knees and purple painted [...]

On the way to the gym I ran into a small woman in a long, dark coat opposite the graveyard. She was waving her cigarette expressively skyward, and shouting very loudly and very unintelligibly at the murky excuses for spring buds adorning the fuel-choked trees. Next to her head, scribbly crayon bubble writing proclaimed loudly [...]

He moved in with his ex and her father quite a while ago. Lost count of the number of days he’s been living on the worn couch in her living room. Sitting and eating and sleeping. It feels more like a prison sentence now than it did when he first arrived. This is no longer [...]

Come to Helsinki, he says, or Stockholm. He gives me his business card, talks and talks and talks over the backs of our two couches. I sink lower. He traces for me his journey from Delhi to Sweden. In between the different countries of his life recalled, he holds a large hardback book with pictures [...]

A screaming child on the bus. Dadadadadadadada! He shrieks at his brother. They sit behind me. Dadada! Over and over and over. Flattening out the wrinkles in my jeans, I wonder whether to turn round and glare or not. Dadadadadada! Shriek. I turn round. A stern man in a leather jacket with a hamster bedding [...]