—our melodrama was the ocean. We were heartsick in anticipation, our looks full-laden with meaning. We stumbled about with eyes like blown bulbs, jealousy giving way to bliss, hope morphing into a yowling fear of death. We resented the future. We marvelled at oaks. We hated pollution. We worshipped the sound of our voices laughing together, their mirror cadence. We despised capitalism. We whispered I don’t want you to die, holding hands on the pedestrian bridge and waving hello to the trains. We were lovers under a wide open window in Paris, sweltering in the knowledge of the heartless working week, its callous first train ready to pull the one away from the other like a startled cloth out from under a vase falling, the hateful kilometres hardening like poured concrete—