I imagine us standing on baked brown sands – our noses crinkling, eyes squinting, cheeks red. You point at my dark burned toes and laugh.

I imagine the lines on your face winking at me, beckoning me to stay. My tired feet feel like they’ve been dipped into a bucket of ice. And I long for the coolness of your palms to turn me over.

I imagine us sitting across each other on a rickety old verandah, the light from the sky long gone but the one in our eyes still intact. The whiffs of the cigars and cognac permeate the air, and our fractured lives.

You orbit that space around me that no one else can fill.