We spent our time picking stars from underneath our fingernails, revelling in what we came to feel was our birthright—the kingdom of the young and glittering who wore satin gloves by day and scarlet lipstick by night. We were wild and beautiful and full of all the arrogance that must always come with privilege and genius. It was our kingdom—everyone said so—and we ruled it with every bit of the riotous abandon necessary to maintain that glorious fever which was the Jazz Age. We drank and danced and laughed (and drank and danced and laughed) until the starlit nights betrayed us and dropped poison in our champagne, broke our hearts and then our heads, and the iridescence of the city was the end of the world. How I mourned its loss.

He was drunk on success and I was sick with ambition. I was sick with ambition; ambition crawled hunch-shouldered in my gut like something living, and I wonder if it might have sprung up golden and breathing with a little nourishment. But he told it to be quiet, and it sat between my organs and squirmed and festered and the rot set a toxin in my bloodstream. And the toxin was ravenous, so that when I kissed him it seeped into his tongue and spread in little black tendrils beneath his skin. I shed little black tendrils in my sweat when I danced and I pressed them into ink to write with, and mixed them with water so I could paint.

And all the while, we were passionate and bold and electric. We drove in cars we couldn’t afford and lived on moonlight and words and jazz music played in nightclubs. I was made of stone and water: a heart and soul cursed by their own nature to erode. We were hunted by our selves, a pulsing synergy of passion and youth and ambition destroying us slowly. Artist and muse. Infinitely restless, restless into infinity.