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home. home again. home, always humid and sweaty, home, always with glassy slick pavements and coursing throughout with a heartbeat of people. the train spat sunny out onto a station platform so familiar he slipped right out of it like a sleepwalker on a terrain of their own creation. the city drew him into its current, letting him pulse gently around the corners and down the steets in the great heartbeat. home was so silent and so warn after the weekend in the other city. sunny let the unfamiliarity run out of his skin with his sweat in the summer ooze, and let his muscles unclench for the first time in two days.
conrad had been cheated on and dumped again. the latest perpetrator had also been the latest 'one'. she was half-dutch and snapped her gum against her teeth so loudly you would think it hurt.

'you were only together for two months con, let it go.'
'imagine the most beautiful thing you can.'
'what.'
'do it, imagine something so beautiful that it's... perfection.'
'fucks sakes.'
sunny had imagined a young deer careering through a pine forest. he didn't know why because he didn't spend any time thinking about what he thought was beautiful, and the first thing he thought of was nature. behind his eyelids the deer's pelt glistened and the sun caught on it's dewy antlers. haunches rose and fell in sync as it pounded through the deathly still green.
'are you doing it?'
'...'
'are you?'
'.. yes.'
'what is it?'
the desperation in conrad's voice had broken sunny away from his creation, and he turned to conrad no longer prostrate in grief on his bed, but twisted towards sunny in agonising anticipation. his face was contorted hysterically and veins surged violet purple in his temples.
'it's a deer or something. i don't know. i think i saw it on dad's nature programme.'
'ok...'
conrad had sighed all of the air out of his body like it hurt him to speak.
'now imagine the deer looking around, for a stream to play in. it hears something. it's heartbeat quickens. the inertia drains from it's legs. it starts, ready to take flight, to run. and then an arrow hits it right in the eye, through to the brain. it's dead. and it'll rot on the floor, and never see another sunrise, or feel deer happiness again.'
imaginary deer felled, sunny had let his head rest backwards onto conrad's bed. conrad's infatuations were fast, intense and painful, like grease spatters from a frying pan. his emotional hyperbole varied from girl to girl, and depending on the quality of the girl. marlene with the cherry hair had been a car crash where the drivers hit each other head on and burst through the windshield, realising only in their last seconds who the other was and kissing each other into death in the air. susan holly, never just susan, was a luscious garden of poisonous blooms. petra with the ceramic horse collection and mysterious counselling books was every christmas you had as a kid, except every single present you ever open was a knife to the stomach.
the metaphors were due in part to conrad being a sensitive poet with a chest willingly left open so that his heart could be reached in seconds, and also to his undertaking of a degree in drama and performance art. every heartbreak was immortalised in monologue form, complete with accompanying tears and wretched hollow beats upon the chest, and performed to a workshop of fellow amateur dramatists.
'con this has happened too many times now. when are you going to get to be the heart breaker?' sunny had thought that mocking might be the only antidote to the affliction of grandiose emotional spiel.
'sunny, it's not in my nature to turn away from love. i open myself fully to it; i turn towards the sun like a blossom. i let the warmth kiss my petal face, and equally i let the rain dampen it.'
'and you let bees eat your face.'
'sun, don't be stupid, come on.'
'and if she's the sun and you're the flower then you're different species. and that's like beastiality.'
'beastiality is between a human and an animal!'
'you would know.'
'look, you just don't understand yet. you've never been in love, little sun. one day soon you'll be stung by love and you'll feel just like i did, before...'
'wait, i'm a bee? i thought if i was in love i was a flower? wait, why would a bee sting a flower?
'i genuinely don't know why i bother.'