“You’re smoking again.”

“You’re drinking again.”

“A little bit of nicotine didn’t kill anyone.”

“Neither did a little bit of rum.”

“Touche.”

You adjust the rearview mirror slightly and crank down the window. You breathe a puff of cigarette smoke and let your hand dangle out the window. You are twirling that old zippo lighter from your old man.

The one your mom asked me to keep for you. The one I keep even though I don’t smoke anymore.

It catches the light from the single lone lamppost in the parking lot as you tap your fingers against the dented car door. There are words that hang in the air perpetually; it’s the unspoken ones that weigh heaviest.

We are just killing time now. It feels like this will be the last time in a long while. Because I think we’re afraid. Afraid that if we keep sitting here, we’ll end up killing a lifetime together.

And who knows what that’ll be like.

You drink from the bottle again. It’s emptied. You throw it out the window. The glass shatters. A dog barks somewhere. A cat screeches. You turn the music louder. It’s the artic monkeys again.

Cause and effect. Action and consequence. Force and resultant.

That’s what brought us to this point. Wounds sewed shut with vices. A pall of despair that hangs over constantly. The lies we tell ourselves and everyone around us. Because the truth is hard to swallow.

I let my fingers run across yours. It’s a familiar feeling. Your nails are red. That’s a familiar colour too.

Red, crimson, scarlet. Spread across the bathroom floor. Washed down the sink. Dissolved in the bathwater.

Etched in my fingerprints. Marked on the porcelain where I gripped it. A river wrung from the rag I used.

Too young to know what to do. Too afraid of the alternatives. Too old to pretend we’ll wake from this dream.

Violence by any other shade is violence all the same. You told me that it’s just the weapon of choice, and a matter of the target.

We’ve seen most of it by now. A knife pointed at yourself. A broken bottle raised against someone you thought loved you.

Like the one that now sits in the parking lot, in pieces.

The cigarette smoke makes me sleepy. The song has changed. It’s the one by the neighbourhood we used to keep on repeat.

I feel like prey, I feel like praying.