I parked the car and thought back on it, on us, on me and you.

Dreaming of the world and dipping our toes in together,

Us, with a closeness only found in teenagers.

My skirt is your skirt, your password is my password.

We share enemies, we share a getting-ready playlist,

I feel an unfamiliar heat rise in my throat when Eoghan hit you in the locker room.

We invest in the one MAC lipstick and we promise to share it forever,

believing it’ll last forever but knowing it’s for as long as it lasts, doesn’t last long but it also never ends.

You’re my best friend and I am yours and I know it,

we’re our mother’s daughters, we’re sisters, we’re cousins, we want to be brothers too.

We were once rumoured lovers and when we heard it whispered behind us in music class, our legs buckled with the cackling,

hands holding to steady each other but not helping the allegations,

with eyes watering and laughing in the way where it travels up from the bottom your heart.

Sometimes we resign ourselves to freakdom,

And sometimes we scour kiss magazine to learn how to be the best girls that we could be.

We’re in the shopping centre, we live in the years between child-playing and adult-hanging out, 

we try to smoke, and I think I’m to blame for this plan for popularity,

twenty duds to every smokable result, all our hopes of fitting in written on now wet unburnable paper.

We have no money yet and are crucially confined to the free, the main barrier to playing grown-up, the last latch on the door,

from the shopping centre, the car park, the shop through the window, 

to bodies of water, to the beach, to the canal, to the basin,

these places don’t belong to anyone so we decide they belong to us.

I pass through these places that were once so ours. 

On the 9, it’s like an open-top tour of our teens, 

I pass the house where I went home with him and hurt, 

and I lied because you were so excited to hear about what it was like,

What the beginning of our lives was like, what the end of ours was like, 

then the current took us and ran us apart.

There’s a security guard in the car park now, defender of the emptiness, no loitering, 

I park my car there and hear an echo of it, of us, of me and you.