K + C
K
K’s favourite emojis are the caterpillar and the night sky.
They have a huge poster of Kate Bush on their wall and a David Shrigley rug and a chaise longue.
K gets stoned and takes hundreds of photos of flowers and makes out with people in trees, which they don’t consider particularly wild.
Sometimes, K carries a wicker handbag shaped like a mallard duck, which is only partly ironic.
K owns no boring shoes.
K is an apprentice cabinetmaker and a classics nerd and an avant-garde poet.
K eats their kiwifruit with copious amounts of ground cinnamon, which I’ve never seen anyone do before but seems indicative of how they do everything: with spice, to a maximum.
K burns incense in the evenings until the air in the house has a physical presence.
Of course, K likes the occult.
They also like David Bowie and angry girl punk and a song called “There is No Depression in New Zealand”, but K will dance to any music and they dance like the music is happening in their body.
K stays up the whole night on half a gram and takes me for a walk at dawn.
K has no difficulty saying I love you; they run screaming fearless into the icy sea.
K is the only white person I know with as many non-white as white friends.
K brings home not single flowers but whole boughs of cherry blossom they have snapped off trees growing on the snobbiest streets of the city.
K is a lit match.
K tells me their life story while we do a jigsaw puzzle and it includes a religious phase and several changes of heart.
If anything bad ever happened to K, it would be like someone had turned my whole skin inside out.
C
C has nine pillows on her bed and four pairs of Docs and self-professed chaotic energy.
C knows all the words to “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”, which she sings into a banana.
C can sing in such a way that you have to listen.
She plays K and me a new song she has written and the light tracing the care on her face tells the whole story.
C is an alternative pop musician and a barista and a clean freak and a peach.
When I bring home seven cakes after the desserts shoot at work, C screams.
C’s dog of choice is a samoyed.
C is in love with the idea of New York City and several people she is definitely too good for.
C dances around the laundromat while the dryer wicks mould out of our clothes. C dances around the backyard while she washes her car.
C drives us to an obscure restaurant in Birkenhead for chimichangas, then enormous ice creams, which we eat in the supermarket carpark with Maude Latour turned up to maximum volume.
Once, when I am very stressed about a deadline, C listens to me rant, considers for a full ten seconds, then says I think you need a vibrator.
C holds me in the dark and lets me cry on the outfit she is filming a music video in.
C cannot get ready in under 35 minutes.
She lies on my bed and talks herself into and out of a problem. She chooses me a dress. She zips me up.
C is better than any novel I’ve ever read; she opens and opens.
C is worried about finding another flat, about being liked, about impressing the right people — but they should be so lucky. C is the square root of lovability.
K + C
There are eight days left before K and C and I will stop living together.
Right now our house is full of flowers: six bouquets from two birthdays, a vast arrangement for C’s recent EP release. In the lounge, with its roses and poppies and orchids and lilies, every sorrow seems sparse. K and C, I wish it always could be. I wish I could fill your lives with enough flowers that you could always visualise how much — just how fucking much! — you are loved.