I really like your room. He says, while placing the skinny monitor on G’s desk. Must be the lighting. It really does everything. Just the right mix of yellow and white. I shift the cigarette between my fingers. It’s just a butt now. He attributes the fascination to rather the chalkboard and the window aloe and everything else tangible. I am meeting him for the first time and the last time, like catching the nearest open liquor store’s shutter going down, halfway through. He’s leaving town the following week.

The house is two blocks of grey and white caught in…

In the morning I wake up with the stench of mangled cabbages rising up the back of my throat and a nicotine-sullied breath and a tousled head rested obliquely upon his spindly chest and he is asleep on his back quiet like an untouched doorknob. I feel queasy. Like my stomach is staging some mutiny against everything that went down last night. Went down its walls. Went down the walls of this house. Before I can cease wondering and locate the coordinates for my slippers — his slippers — vomit is rising from the centre of the nucleolus of my…

2:15 AM. I am thinning out a brick of butter into a pan, waiting for him to intervene and scoop out another cube. Only that he is in my inbox slipping me bad puns and dad jokes. I wonder if what we share also began like this. Some runny pancake batter, given carte blanche over the flame.

It had all started outside that pub on the fifth block. I had gone out celebrating my flatmate’s friend’s baby daughter’s birthday with my flatmate and her friend and her baby daughter. I had worn my new flamingo-pink earrings, navy blue denim shorts…