It was my week of smelling beautifully. Oil of orange, cream of parsley. Delicate mist from clouded glass. It was my week of taking my perfumed neck and anointed cheeks out into sun where covens of wing’d opals erupted into swarms above dog shit they’d been brooding over. It was my week of some sort of exercise in the middle of the grass, an old woman shifting weight from knee to knee as though getting comfortable for a hefty prayer. The sun set and I took my scent inside. Lightning high up in the window came and went like the blue whiz of a security light. At that a phrase bubbled from someplace. I thought it a bird: Blue Russet. But no, two colours I’d collided. My image search showed dual-tone glitter, a silver car under UV light, blue potatoes cut to cubes, a wren with a brown vest. I added bird and was fed a headline Most Beautiful Blue Birds which I read not as a category but an unfinished sentence. Most beautiful blue birds do what, exactly? During this time I was intoxicated by an album. It was my week of intoxication. I played it every day, sometimes five times. The man who wrote it was very young or seemed very young relative to his lyrics and voice which I found uncharacteristically rich for a person his age. My friend and I corresponded about this and agreed we were more creatively interesting at 22 because, as she put it, of sweet oblivion and upward curiosity. It was my week of aching and inhabiting old rooms with lively intent. I entertained repainting or moving furniture radically about. I resolved to clench my ass cheeks and claim feelings with the narrowed slit. It was my week of finding affinity with this resolution and the inexplicable desire to run credit cards through my friends’ asses that breached the dawn water of hot springs we splashed nudely in. I did not vocalise my desire. That one but also many others. At four AM I am gifted a slaughtered possum and the feeling I am doomed to express affection forevermore in impenetrable languages. My dowry is a thousand dead skinks. Things are getting worse. Or things were always worse. Or things were worse then got worse once more. Breathing is pleasing. Birds again.