At the abandoned Air Force base, we walk through crumbling military houses. Vines crawl through the windows of nineteen-fifty style bathrooms.

I feel as though a vacuum has been applied to my chest, like the air has been sucked from my body into the void.

You wander over glass shards and moldering linoleum floors, your posture in a perpetual shrug.

“I was afraid that if we kissed, I would feel nothing,” I say. Maybe we would be standing in a kitchen, the sunlight streaming in, lips touching in the most mundane way.

We talk about entrainment, how being around other people helps us regulate our nervous systems, like ocean tides or rain on a roof, brain waves in temporal hierarchies.

“I used to believe in auras, electricity, and all that, but I think my stress disorder makes me feel like a stomped bouquet,” you say.

“Yeah,” I agree, walking out the front door of a light green living room.

Goldenrod grows from cracks in the asphalt. A rabbit zig-zags into tall grass.

“Let’s play house,” you say before a driveway full of weeds.

“Okay,” I nod, picking a handful of yellow ragwort. A crow flies overhead. Aster shudders against a chain-link fence in the distance.

I follow you inside. Light falls on the floor through a broken window. You pretend to make coffee. I iron a shirt. I burn the collar and you spit out the grounds. You read the paper, with legs crossed, pushing invisible glasses up your nose. I cook dinner from imaginary cans. We listen to the radio: the 5 o’clock news, a baseball game in which everyone loses. We aren’t good at playing house.

“Maybe worse than nothing. Maybe we would continue to feel the dull stabbing in our chests,” you say.

“Maybe,” I reply.

We forsake our made-up chores.

Outside we lay down on the deserted street and pretend to sleep.

You turn off the light.

I feel my body dissolve into blackness and neon shapes: the dissociation of absent scenery, all the time spent afraid of being myself, the disappointments of honesty.

You make lists of memories we don’t have and recite them as we dream.

“It’s alright,” you say, reaching for my hand. The ocean rises pooling through old radar towers and barracks. The water laps against our feet, soaks our clothes. My hair sways like seaweed as we are absorbed into the abyss.