5am

I would sleep in the front, hidden only by a gate and a blanket. The cars would drive past and if I knew a friend was near I would wake to greet them. I thought of installing a lock but never actually bothered. She had a small person with her this day, he resembled her past lover in so many ways and I just knew that this child had to be hers. She had kept him hidden. I shook his hand and called him mister, and her face had suddenly aged, she had become someone I had known many years before.

I had proof. It was hidden inside of an old answering machine at the head of my bed, attached to the wall. It was a joke, a prank, pulled by myself and my lover and my then future husband. It ended in anger, in screams, in old violent American films and me alone for the rest of my life. In me, nothing more than crumpled dirty clothes on the floor of different hotel rooms.

When my father was drunk he would scream at me through the gate. Bash his hands up against the metal and scream at me to come out, to come out and be his child. To make him feel like he was more than just an old man. By this time I had eight boys that soon became twelve. They had been playing and came to see what the fuss was, what he was fussing over. He softened as he saw the boys and pulled from his history twelve broken guitars. He told them he would not be around to see their fortune, but he would always have them in his heart. This is where he was criminal and merciless and this is where he was fearful and irrelevant. I thought about telling the children to put the guitars down and never accept gifts from strangers, but after all he had done, I could not do this.

My husband had received the deed to this hotel. And yet, I still slept alone.

You say the secret ingredient is everything, and I don’t know how to cook what you are on about. We say the secret ingredient is learning how to spell correctly, but it isn’t really. It’s just an easy way to pretend to be stupid.

I met him by some sort of lake, but I doubt it’s true, because I don’t imagine I have ever seen a lake in my life, not that I would remember if I had. We sat on some wood, like a jetty of some sort, but little. A bridge perhaps. You were there to kill me, of course, as always. This time it was a different kind of kill, and you were just a child. I couldn’t believe it as you were much, much taller than me and I had been alive for quite some time. I was not a child.

I thought maybe you had forgotten everything as well as I, and it would suddenly make sense. But it didn’t, and you showed me your umbilical cord which had only just begun to shrivel and fall off. A cord that was probably made of twisted fibres, of which had probably kept you alive for this long, having no idea who you were or where you were going. But oh well.

I kind of giggled that day, because I think it took you twenty four years to realise that it wasn’t an umbilical cord at all, but the one thing that would tie you to another human being, eventually, if one were to exist. Giggling is for stupid people, you said. And from then on, I made a point of giggling as much as I could. I didn’t want to be smart anymore. I didn’t want to know you.