Niamh left this morning. I watched her walk down the lonely lifetime we've shared. I think she's in love with me but she just can’t say it. So she leaves instead. Before she got in her car she greeted the neighbour. Typical Niamh. I tucked myself into bed with a low hum of relief. Last night Niamh told me: the thing I love most about touching you is that you never want to touch me. It’s like I don’t exist.

Niamh got up this morning, walked all the way down to the tip of the world and jumped off. On the way she stole the neighbours car and told him to fuck himself. Niamh is a bit of an asshole. You should know. As nice as I am, Niamh is three times as cruel. Last night a blackbird tapped on the nape of her neck, her eyes rolled down her cheeks and just hung there. Swinging. The sound they made was nauseating.

Niamh cleaned out the fridge before she left. She took all the prescription pills, I know her. We had thirty-five left of xanax, surprise. It's been a dull month. She fingers the bottle until it comes apart. She'll fill her mouth until her head shuts up, I know her. We had twenty-two seroquel. She'll write home about her dreams: the world ends and restarts and each time there's one day missing, a hole in the space time continuum and I live in that day and it gets longer every night. We had five prozac. She flushed those, I know her. They make her brain spacey, they remind her of electroconvulsive shock treatments. Dry mouth. I can't kiss with a dry mouth. We had fourteen lithium. Niamh will light a cigarette, touch the pills until they get hard. But she won't take them, I know her.

Niamh left me a note: did you know you can come without touching yourself if you listen to the right music?

Niamh buys vinyls and wears them through laying in bed naked, pushing honey out of her cunt and then she drinks it. Her green-gold eyes buzz in her skull and she is illuminated. The queen bee is eaten by the rest of the hive once she’s fulfilled her purpose, too decrepit to carry on, once she’s useless. Soon another bee will be fattened up into a queen and the circle will carry on and on and on until every bee in the world has eaten a fat hole through Niamh’s tongue.

Niamh is drunk. Somewhere in the space between her eyes and her mouth she keeps a small bottle of rum. Niamh fucking hates rum so she never drinks it. When she’s desperate she’ll smash her head against the mirror until the glass breaks through her skin and her cheeks are drenched in liquor. It’s fine mixed with blood. I crawl out of the wreckage and take her head in my hands, shake her. Niamh is a stubborn mess. Just drink something pleasant. But Niamh won’t listen. I’m the one who did this to her.

I would tell her I’m sorry if she were here, and if I was, but Niamh left last night and I'm not. Niamh is missing. Process of elimination tells me she brought with her a wrench, a lullaby, a memory. The missing Niamh doesn’t need much, she just doesn’t want to be heavy.

I walk down the block, the neighbour doesn't wave back. I want to shout at him. He's a prick, that guy. Always standing there with his fly down. I never look for Niamh when she goes. By now she’d be halfway down the highway, checking into a motel. She is alive. The dim light is moving around the room, bulb flickering. I can feel it.

I check my pulse.

Niamh is missing, I know her. She's on a flight to Northern Ireland. She'll jump off before it lands and dip her skin in the sky just above the place her father was born: Royal Jubilee Maternity Hospital, Belfast. And it will feel like home, how she imagined it. Bombs and dirt and rubble. Niamh wants to write a letter to her grandmother. It would say, in a million different ways: why did you do it? And how? And please don’t respond to this. And I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. It’s because I was afraid of you.

Niamh kept her eyes closed all night so she could see you. When she opened them the world was black, her bedroom broke off from the house and floated away into space, ascending through a solar flare and on the other side she saw a thin mouth, her mother’s. Screaming at her like: go to bed you sleep deprived whore. The mouth gets bigger and bigger, Niamh crawls inside it. It’s warm. She searches it for the womb where she came from. She can hear fiddle music. Roman Catholic sermon. Bagpipes. A hacking cough. Her mother's lungs are two bags of dust. Niamh takes a nibble out of each for a hit of nicotine. It’s a long walk from here to the edge of everything.

I wake up in my life, my mother's nose stuck to my face like the cigarette butts she used to shove in the wall. The nose is broken. The blood moves slowly up my face instead of down.

Niamh is chewing on zero gravity, trying to intimidate it into letting her go. Her jaw pops in and out of place. Her mother’s hands are inching nearer, nearer, trying to pull her out. Niamh is screaming to herself. Sound waves don’t exist inside a vacuum. Niamh has been asphyxiated by the net of nothing that surrounds her. It’s cold. Her body is shaking like a pathetic person would. I want to hold her but she’s missing. I'll get her later.

Besides. She’s in good hands, says the doctor. Everybody has a mother.

I pop my nose back into place, roll my eyes down and look. The mirror is a window where I look up at the sun, a thin black hole in the centre, opening, opening, opening until the circle disappears and the world turns black. Niamh comes home, her hair and lips singed. Her tongue dry from prozac. She unlocks her new life, and finds me. Hanging my arms like a crucifix over every doorway, taunting her until she breaks free.