6.

This is what you see when you close your eyes. You see her spinning and spinning like a top, arms flung out wide and head thrown back. Her hair streams around her like ribbons and her mouth grins wide. She stamps and whirls and sends her drink spilling down her chin and throat, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She is frozen in the camera flash, giddy and gilded and always laughing.

You can smell her, animal and scent and smoke and wine. She blinks up at you, eyes sleep-hooded, lips barely parted, and falls back into darkness. She murmurs as she dreams.

She is alive in a wash of colour and a tumble of sound. You were dazzled by the sunlight that fell across her, slicing her into dark and light. She danced with strangers as you stood at the bar and waited for her to come back to you, panting and glazed in sweat.

This is how you remember her then, the glowing girl in a sea of black. She is the focus of all your rooms and the walls fall down like a house of cards.

She is the girl sitting on the platform in the snapshot. Every time the shutter drops she is further away, hands folded in her lap, watching the train pull out. She will always be there at the vanishing point.