the right and proper thing

I walked across the car park just as the sun was coming up. During the night burnouts had appeared on the asphalt in formations that resembled crop circles. I thought momentarily about how the patterns of civilisation inscribed on the earth would look from the sky.

I still had that buzzing feeling in the side of my neck that I always get from ice. I kept rubbing a particular point on my shoulder with my thumb knuckle. I convinced myself that this amateur acupuncture could cure my comedown.

I needed to find that photo booth. I clearly remembered the inside of it. Where we had fucked madly, feeding sweaty coins into the money slot to squeeze out blurry shots of our entwined limbs. This city still seemed unfamiliar to me, especially at this hour of the morning. I had no idea what the booth looked like from the outside.

However, I did have the photos in my back pocket. They were burning a hole there like little squares of kryptonite. I’d thought to use them for directions to the booth, believing that they would instinctively guide me like thumbs on an ouija board. But drenched in the post-dawn glow of the car park my feet were drowning in the bitumen. I could not move. I could not conceive which direction to head in. My internal compass was broken. Not that it ever really worked. It had led me straight to you and that was one of the most fucked up pieces of navigation in my life.

I pulled out a packet of chewing gum from my bag and shoved all seven pieces in my mouth at once. I started chewing ferociously, working up the bile in my stomach, sloshing around great wads of saliva in my mouth. Sucking and slurping on the lump of white rubber like a cow chewing cud.

The more I chewed, the hotter the bile in my stomach burned, until it seethed like the lump of kryptonite, as if I had pulled it out of my pocket and shoved it down my throat like a fist. The bile began to stream from my mouth in spurts of magma, vomit erupting all over the car park. My body convulsing with spasms of nausea. Ejecting every last drop of fluid from my abdomen. Chunks of our respective hearts. You told me that you had done the right and proper thing by breaking mine.