Four

In this building there can be no place for the sun, it waits, glum, burning duller for me outside. Paris flicks through a Vogue catalogue in the waiting room, ‘what bag would you have?’ she asks me, turning the pages over and over, I don’t even look down. Tim asks me to call him Tim and does not ask me why I am here, I am grateful for this. There are bodies that we replace with bodies and I wonder if that’s what you would have been for me — folding and rolling inside, taking pieces without asking, I still think how I never got to see your little bum. Sitting in that space, all I could think about were the bony kanuka trees on the hills at Wharariki, how they bend and then eventually must splinter. All I could think about were the layers I had to peel from myself in hope that, one day, they will eventually restick.