We’ve been going out for ten months, nearly eleven. In the early days, I was completely overwhelmed by her. She was everything that youth is – free, unspoiled, infinitely active.

I wrote this after about a month, and my obsession and energy comes through in a style that’s sometimes excessive. Regardless, it’s one of the stories I’m most proud of. It’s about us.

Us

The night’s alive. There’s a humming energy, like fucking thousands of volts are just waiting for us to plug in. We thank the parents and stumble down the front path, out to the gate, and I snake my arm around her waist and pull her close to me. Jack’s behind us, smiling to himself, and I grab him too and put him in a headlock with my other arm and kiss the top of his head, pressing these people against me. We laugh and try to talk, but it’s too funny and we’re too full of everything the night has built us into and we just keep laughing and I slump against her chest and wrap my arms around her neck and we head out the gate.

Outside, I turn her to me and put a hand on the back of each of her hips and don’t let her go, I press my lips against hers and press her body against me, full of love and longing and her presence, soft and real. The seconds melt together as everything hazes, and the haze is her so close to my eyes, her soft cheeks and the makeup she’d be beautiful without and the hair I hold in my hand. All my ache and unsurety, disillusionment and driftingness are there, but they’re packed right down. Erased to such a faint trace that they’re barely there. All I know, all I can be is her. I hold her face in both hands, desperation breathing through my lungs and the need, the urgency to let her know everything that she is. I need to make her know how beautiful she is, how much she encapsulates everything that deserves my seconds on earth. I whisper to her that I love her, and she squeezes her eyes tight in a smile that says she knows.

Then we’re walking, staggering and alive in the drive of the night, our arms are full of force and our eyes can only see hope, everything in me feels young. I feel her in the crook of my arm, and bury my face in her hair and want to stay like this, to collect up her narrow limbs and carry her like a baby. I want to hold her until I die, to fucking destroy anything that even looks like it threatens her. From the haze, Jack’s walking along beside us, in his own world. I let her go and jump on him, grabbing him round the shoulders and pulling him.

He laughs and we talk in sounds that are barely words, telling each other how much we’re the best friends ever and we’ll get an apartment in New York and I’ll be a writer and he’ll start a band with people he finds there, and we hug as we walk and I feel like I’m home. This person, whose face and body I know like I know the walls of my room, is everything I know and love.  I feel us together, our current sweeping along the road as Jack knick-knocks a house like we’re eleven again and we all bolt for our lives, laughing and panting and feeling the air tear at our clothes hair faces and our hearts and lungs are going to explode but we keep going.

Later, we’re in a park, and she’s on the flying-fox upside-down and I’m clapping and going nuts and Jack’s on the phone. The night is safe, stretching further than we could ever walk, and it’s all ours. Trees hide us, and I chase her across the grass, and we shove each other like boys. We’re kissing, then we’re running, then we’re kissing. Then Jack’s telling me about the loneliness that’s wallpapered on the inside of his soul, that feels like a black sludge coating every inane bullshit word he or someone else speaks, and anything we do is useless and temporary entertainment. Then I’m grabbing his hand with both of mine and trying to stick the truth into his head: that here, this, us, is beautiful: not waiting, not wanting, just out and living like we won’t be able to when we’re dead at the end of our seventy, eighty, years. This, i make him know, is fucking beautiful. Raw real new, jostling and awkward, mundane and stupid, quaint and enigmatic, this is a fucking gift that we’ve got here. I think, even though I’ve been exactly where he is so I know that someone else telling you can’t make you know, that he appreciates the effort. And having someone to talk to about the island that he is, the lonely kid who’s alone even when he’s out in the thick of it with his best friend, is worth something.

We get fish and chips. It disappears in minutes, drunk animals feasting. We’re sitting eating it on a shopping centre roof carpark, the stars weak diluted by the lights of the carpark above us, but I let everyone know in my pretentious verbose drunken way that despite the taint of this urban cage we can still transcend, glimpse a hope, a ghost of nature’s beauty. I hold her and rest my forehead on hers, too close to focus, and think how inadequate words are as a bridge between you, your experience, your world, all you live and someone else’s perception. Then I throw a chip at Jack, and bolt down the ramp dodging a car as he chases me and flipping off the cars which beep us. Our limbs pound, our sneakers hit the concrete, and when he catches up to me he jumps on my back and wraps his legs around me. My back’s about to break but I carry him anyway, drunk enough to run with him bumping on my back along a footpath next to a main road. She catches up to us at the corner, and then we’re sitting on a wall drinking.

I feel the strength of the suburbs. All the lies, the pettiness and packed lunches and dropping the kids off at gym, ballet, footy, the unspoken racism and fears that all this could go in a second, the cars and the houses and trees.  All of it. For the first time, I think how invincible this way of life is. The grids of these streets are etched in deep.  I think of marrying her. Seeing her every day, seeing her face and feeling her love and giving. A child with her, a child which we’d raise with all our love and we’d be a triangle of strength, perfect, unity and balance and we’d support and build each other until we were unstoppable. I’m listening to my iPod, dancing like a monkey with an itch, and Jack’s filming it and she’s just laughing, then I do magic tricks with a coin and a car’s bumped up onto the curb, stopping just short of my leg.

What the fuck , I laugh.

It’s my brother, fucking pissed up as usual, Jack says. The window rolls down and there’s the smell of beer from inside. A larger, more bearded, fatter Jack is sitting inside.

Where to, kiddies, he smiles. His eyes are only three-quarters open.  Jack slides over the bonnet like a 70’s cop and gets in the passenger door. She reaches for the door, but I grab her hand and grab her face with both hands, probably because I know, I can see exactly how this is. I kiss her. I love her through my lips, i pull her head against mine and don’t let her escape the knowledge of how much she is my world, my everything. My head resting against hers, I look at her eyes.

I love you, I fucking love you so so much. She lays her hands on my cheeks.

I love you.

The lights flash by. Music, light sliding over her face as all I can see is her eyes, all I ever want to do is stay here with her. I would marry this girl. Opportunity cost: I would throw away ever fucking other girl that was, is and will be for a life with her. The lights flicker quicker over her face, and I reach my hand out and press it to her breast, and feel her heart beat into my hand. There’s noise. Light. Pain, then peace.