Because I enjoy the pleasure of your company, I am going to build a strictly proverbial door and then shut it quickly in your face

N was standing at the windowsill. N was wearing a loose white muslin dress. The thickness of a late afternoon sun dripped gently into the room and lit up the triangle beneath her legs, filled the holes she made with hands on hips.

"I need some space from this new friendship," N said. "I simply need some space. I need to talk to you a little less."

"I'm having a blue period," N continued. "I'm in a rather transitory state. I'm feeling monochrome. I'm feeling sombre. I turn on the television and everything is forcibly tired, like a set of plastic pliers pulling down on fragile eyelids. I watch the news and feel depressed. It’s laced with poison, that whole industry. It’s thick and heavy, full with sick.”

“I loathe my cupboard,” N went on. “The thin little wooden doors. I open it up and I want to burn everything inside.”

“I think I see you too much," N repeated. "We need to amend that. Let’s have some space. Let’s keep this casual. Let’s be our own people. Yes I know we are our own people. But let’s remember that. Let’s be apart sometimes. Let’s slow things down. Give me back that DVD, yes that one. I’ll watch it a second time on my own.”

The only time he let them down was the time they let him go.

It was nice to belong there, with the gang, with the crew, with the homies – ok they never called themselves homies, they weren’t of colour or cred – but it was nice to belong with them nonetheless. There was something about togetherness, something that roused a surge of vague emotions inside, something that was printed in thick black comic sans on stickers in tourist shops and the dusty two-dollar racks in the corner of greeting card stores. It was a kind of strength, or a joy, or a pride or something similar that crept down from oiled hairs to tightly laced shoes. He was one of them; they had a purpose. He could saunter into their afternoon gathering and give someone a high five and another someone a friendly nod. They were a gang of familiarity, names were known and stories told. Like what he’d had for breakfast (eggs) and why everyone’s mother was a Class A NAG. He said things like ‘fucking A!’ and no one thought he was joking, or had made a mistake; he rolled previously forbidden words around with his tongue, considered them as they bounced between cheeks, and gently flicked them out. And it was ok.

And people laughed. They laughed at his jokes, this gang. They lifted their heads from the photocopy jobs, from the cartoon images of Engels winking cheekily at Marx, and they smiled, one by one, a flood of watery association.

It was in university he had come upon them, a chance flyer sitting on his tutorial table, and he had nothing better to do, no one to see, so he went to them. They were all long-hair, all dank cheeks, all swing low boys and girls, with their feet up up up on the table and big thoughts on their shoulders. They understood things that he didn’t know this kind of people understood, they networked with the small town campus politicians and sometimes they spat about them later. They read old paperbacks and hated coca cola, but they had liked him, had shook his hand like a businessman and not an undergraduate, lent him flannelette shirts and reworked soviet dreams.

He felt uneasy from the moment that he brought it up. He pushed it outward with a tentative tip, tapped it just beyond his bottom teeth, until it flowed out quickly and naturally, like the contents of a jerry can, setting all the catechisms alight. It was something to do with economic management, something he had heard his father say, something other men said over the newspaper, with a coffee in hand and a deep authority; something he had wondered but never understood. It came out in questions, angrily, in warped confusions of text and integrity, in a quick and awkward flurry. And suddenly the doors were shut, if not proverbially, then quite literally and he wondered, his organs curdled, why he had ever even spoken at all.

Pomona, California

Rosie was all lady, she was. She was all thick silver zips and untreated leather, tiny freckled nose. She was small hips Ro. She tied her shoelaces tight and wore lumpy black cardigans, heard the husk of Tom Waits’ rise slowly out of old speakers in her one-bedroom apartment, telling her about the apricot tips she set alight in indigo skies.

I asked Rosie if she loved me and she told me that she did.

“Do you love me Ro?” I asked. “Do you?”

She was stripes down to her little toe, she was tight jeans and slick, slick, slick.