then maybe we’d believe you were only messing around when you offered that city boy your arm, exposed the gentle veins that ran beneath your skin like rivers under cloud and you didn’t feel abandoned or afraid at the end, you were dreaming, that’s all, and in the dream you spent four hundred dollars on a second-hand, stick shift sedan and drove back up the coast and when you looked through the windscreen you didn’t see red dust, cracked earth and trees bent flat to the ground by relentless flinted winds, you only saw blue, endless blue.