Once when we were 14 my friend gave me her favourite pen to write with because I was sad. That was when our skins were still golden brown and all we knew of sadness was broken hearts and broken bones. These days, the city feels like a swamp and this empty house that did not birth me, did not shelter me, only swallowed me whole, gave me a gaping hole inside, black as night. Is emptiness something that is given, passed down as a gift, as inheritance, as a disease, as a curse from the house to the housed? This house that has no history. This house that I long to leave, this house that longs to die, when my friend calls I don’t know what to talk about. My heart is a black hole. My heart is a black hole that only knows how to forget.