Art by Nadia Uddin
Outlines
by Will Pinhey
We last a year without seeing each other.
Ours had been a gripping, weightless infatuation that saw us sleepwalk through four carnivorous years together. Insomniacs, the pair of us, we both got hooked on amphetamines for our final year, until our addictions and paranoia got the best of us and my family staged an intervention. I went cold turkey in my childhood bedroom, sweating and shaking and watching yonic patterns bloom and birth their way up the walls around me. She lived with a friend of ours until she was kicked out for letting their housecat escape, a pathetic lump of an animal that had probably never set foot on tarmac before and was cut neatly in two by the Deliveroo driver she’d opened the door to flag down. Last I heard she was doing a throuple thing, splitting time between their two places. She was always moving like that – no status quo ever lasted too long before she tore it all down to start again.
When I finally emerge from my suburban hibernation I move into a shitty bedsit in the city, squashed and clinical and right on the blind corner of an intersection that yields hourly furious honks and yells, a smell of paint to the walls that can never be hidden beneath incense, food, or smoke. Still, it returns that crucial sense of autonomy my life had been missing during my recovery period and, cramped as it is, at the end of the day all I need space for is my workbench. Up until my sobriety I was running a modestly successful bespoke jewellery business, and now I’m trying my best to supplant my addiction with work. I don’t buy a TV and cancel all my streaming subscriptions to make sure I stay as undistracted as possible when I’m on my laptop, and fill my days bent over my workspace, soldering and sanding, shaping and bending. My mind feels clear and uncompromising, like I’m racing towards something that never gets any closer, but never less urgent all the same. My heart rate is perpetually high, my chest thundering with unearned adrenaline and the raw clarity of unimpeded time alone with my thoughts. I’m only sleeping three hours a night, but my energy never dwindles, and my productivity is ruthless. I get the website back up and running, and orders, whilst slow, start to trickle in. I shamelessly overcharge but people still bite, and I get a profile in some artsy online fashion journal that gives me enough of a sales boost to cover my rent for the next month in advance.
I think of her often but keeping busy staves off a collapse into something debilitating. I always wear her, a second layer of skin that can’t be shed, bled, or peeled loose, but I learn how to live around feeling her pressing against me, how to carry her like any other limb. Not something you pay attention to.
I ease myself back into my social life, picking up the threads of friendships left hanging by my isolation, letting myself drink but never to excess, avoiding large gatherings and deflecting most of the prying into my wellbeing by asking questions about them instead. It goes well. People are pleased to ‘have me back’.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling this lifestyle shift is illusory, something I’m enacting or imitating rather than genuinely inhabiting. Anxiety starts to creep in, this growing sense I’m going to be found out for the fraud I am, masquerading as a fake resemblance of a person I could never actually embody. My sleep becomes more fractured. Hours staring at the ceiling, listening to the same three white noise compilations on repeat. I start getting days confused, forget where I’ve put things within minutes of setting them down, and I get frequent stomach cramps or chest pains. I go into therapy but find myself extremely selective with the information I share, focusing entirely on my addiction with little to no mention of the woman who lived through it all with me. Talking about her feels wrong – she has become something secret inside me, where letting her out into the open feels like a violation that would cause her to vanish from the home I’ve built for her inside my head.
When I see her name light up my phone screen one black December evening, there’s no surprise or fear or confusion to react with. It feels more like validation. Something expected. That this has finally happened, as I always knew it would.
The words we share are brief but each one precious and charged, like we only have a finite amount to use. It’s a simple request. Come over.
There’s no choice to be made. It’s physical. An answer predetermined in the heat that floods my body at the sound of her voice. I shower, take two shots of whisky, and step into the night at her request. Summoned and obedient. Wilfully uncaring of the consequences for either of us.
When she opens the door, there’s nothing to be spoken. The feeling inside me is something close to rage, which I can’t explain but I can tell she feels it too because when we touch each other it’s ferocious. Brutal with honesty.
The tenderness comes in the moments between. A year’s worth of pent-up mingled appetite and agony means we’re incapable of being anything less than territorial when our bodies catch a taste of each other, but in the stillness that separates these collisions there’s safety in the other’s arms, there are whispers we haven’t been able to pass on to anyone else, and there’s the disbelief in touching the face you’ve lost to so many mournful mornings, dissipating with waking.
We steal fragmented hours of sleep once the sun breaks, and then fall into, through, and around each other all over again. We spend the rest of the day in bed, alternating between lying there in silence, tracing each other with our eyes, our fingers, our tongues, and giggling like we’re high, or clawing at the other for more. When the afternoon comes, we still haven’t eaten or drank a thing in the whole time we’ve been together, and I remember how easy she made it to forget the basic act of looking after myself, to unlearn everything innate to a person and neglect food, responsibility, or reality.
We both have plans that evening, plans that loom ever closer with each passing minute and threaten to pull us out of this self-contained, time-defying sanctuary we’ve built for ourselves. I want to cancel, but don’t want to be the first to suggest it. Besides, I can tell she won’t let me. There’s a sadness hanging over us now, something cold and inevitable that neither of us wants to acknowledge. That biting, undeniable truth we both know, deep down – this could never work.
She’s the first to say it. Of course. Always the realist, no matter how recklessly she moves through life. Too much between us, she says. A history not only long and complicated, but bloody. Dangerous. People in both our lives that would refuse to accept it. No matter how much we may still want it, the damage is done. Burning down our lives for each other sounds so wildly romantic, but nothing’s there when we try to picture how it would look, how our lives would arrange around it.
We cry. Plead, although not with each other. More for some solution to materialise. Something to come down, take us away from our circumstance, construct us anew in a life where we didn’t throw the one we could have had together away.
I leave her flat and feel like I’m entering a different world to the one I came from last night. I feel out of place. Intangible. The faces that pass me seem both more distant and more hostile. I feel like if I stepped in mud, I wouldn’t leave a footprint. If I breathed on a window, there would be no mist. It begins to rain, and I watch as the water passes through my body, without impact, so that I leave no outline on the pavement.
About the author:
Will Pinhey is a UK-based writer across film, theatre, and prose fiction. His debut folk horror feature film 'Mother Maker Lover Taker' premiered at Unrestricted View Film Festival in 2024, winning the Festival Director’s Choice Award, and was released to streaming platforms internationally in 2025. He has been the winner of the National Theatre’s New Views playwriting competition, and his short stories can be found published with Idle Ink, Crow & Cross Keys, The Horizon, Literally Stories, Bristol Noir, and Scribbled.
