Because I Couldn't Kill You. Kelly-Eve Koopman

crack. Nothing feels lovely on these days, it looks like rotting wood and rusty nails.

      We have had problems before. But I had done the thing I had learned to do through my generational memory and my upbringing, which was to suppress.

      Together we fell into all of each other’s dark. Merging to make a massive sinkhole, a black hole. We broke up over and over again, I ran out the house in my pyjamas, crashed on the couch at friends. Over this period of months, we break up with the slamming of doors, the breaking of hearts. Words so bluntly ugly and so banal that they do not deserve to be written down. We are scratching at each other’s flaws, insecurities, eviscerating each other. Yet we are compelled back here, intertwined in every way – bank balances, job options. Bones, hearts. She clutches me by the shoulders. I’m standing by the door. ‘Please, please. Just go. I love you and I hate this.’ Almost every day she asks me why, why do we do this, why are we still here? What is there left?

      I don’t realise she expects an answer. I think somewhere deep down I have come to think that this is the way it is meant to be. That love means suffering, hurting each other, enduring the pain, punctuated by pauses of joy. I don’t want to lose her. I blame my father for his curse. I need a shaman, a medium who banishes living ghosts.