7

Matt from The further:

"It rains. Inside I ask.

The house is empty but my housemates are full of pride and platitudes, their egos ballooned by the endless attentions of Myspace. Like puddles on the floor they sit absorbed in themselves, calling after their internet fantasies, cradling dreams of beauty and bliss and emotional salvation.

But Hazel is nowhere to be seen.

I think of a girl. I listen over old recordings, and as if rummaging in a sack, broken appliances and discarded belongings of the soul, I sense through you Auckland, I wonder where she is now. Has she forgotten already what tender joinings found in the depths of the curtained night?

And it rains. And lovers embrace, feeding off each others heat, gently stroking one another in an unacknowledging thanks for loneliness now lost, now banished, now forgotten, now forgone.

And as the pools gather outside on the street I think of lonely pools gathering in her eyes, an embrace that asked me to absorb her, absolve her of her pains, make her pure again in my arms. For desperate, relentless and hard is the empty envelope of the night. A lost girl runs amidst the darkness, she hides but wants to be found. A boy swims through her pain bound by a need, only to be needed, to be looked to, to rest her mind, to make her safe.

But never happy, never rested, never satiated, her pain yawns like a chasm, for him to create something incredible, something unreal, something false: A picture of a happy past that she never owned. And however though his love may flow through the crevices, seeping into her soul filling every gap he can only hold her in his arms and hope for a moment she can forget, and remember that he loves her."