I lay next to her side-by-side. My feet tap against the wall, my back against the bed. I am restless.

She sits upright to my left. I look up at her and I feel complete. She is me wearing different skin.

I breathe.

I breathe.

I breathe.

I think.

I speak:

“I think that if you died I would too.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’d be like those Pompeii victims, y’know? They’d find us tangled up around each other eventually. If you died, I would wrap myself around you and cradle your skull until we both became dust.”

“Gross.”

There is silence before she speaks again.

“I’d do the same for you.”

We cackle at the same time.

Our fingers tangle together.

My hair splays out beneath me. It gets stuck under my shoulders but I am unable to move.

There is peeling paint on the wall.

I stretch out my fingers to scratch at the edges.

I look at the slowly revealing drywall while my mouth starts to form words.

“I think our parents are getting a divorce.”

“I know.”

“It’s different for me, I think.” “How so?”

“Well, my mom didn’t really raise you. I’ve known your dad since I was seven. I know my mom was around for you but it wasn’t the same. Your dad raised me. Like actually took care of me. I don’t know, it just feels weird that it might be over.” “It’s been over for a long time.”

Our fingers tangle more deeply. You cannot tell where I begin and she ends.

I blink slowly.

* * *

I open my eyes. The corners are covered in shadows. The sun has set.

She is slumped against the wall. I can hear her breath. It would take a miracle to wake her.

My feet are still propped against the wall. I roll over and look at her. Her curls are a lighter version of mine. Our fingers are still tangled.

I move closer to her. I grip her forearm with both of my hands. She is my home now. I would crawl inside her if I could.

I blink.

* * *

She opens her eyes. She feels my finger nails digging into her arm. She cannot find it in her to care.

She moves from the wall. She lays face-to-face with me. She traces my eyes with her own. She sees my eyelashes resting against my cheeks and remembers the first time she saw it.

She disentangles our limbs so that she can further reach towards me. She takes my glasses off of my face and puts them next to her.

She blinks.

* * *

I open my eyes.

Her hair is tangled with mine. She is closer than before.

Our arms are twisted together. You could not separate us with a knife. You could not separate us with words.

I lean forward and rest my forehead against hers. Her heart pulls towards mine and I cannot resist.

I try to capture the details of her face.

Eventually, I will forget her but not today.

I memorize the placement of her moles and the distance of her eyebrows. I look at her lips slightly parted and the gap between her front teeth that is a memory from our childhood.

I will not fall asleep. I will stay with her as long as I am able.

I am unable.

I blink.

I open my eyes.

I resist the lure of sleep.

It is too strong.

I am stronger.

I am weak.

I blink.

* * *

We open our eyes.

We blink.

We move our heads in tandem.

There are doubled spots of peeling paint on the wall.

The shadowed corners are numerous.

We slink out of bed and look out the windows.

* * *

Tomorrow when our parents find us,

a freak of nature, they will wrap our body

in newspaper and carry us to a museum.

But tonight, we are alive and in our bedroom and

with each other. It is a perfect

summer evening; the moon shining

in the sky, the wind against the trees.

And as we stare into the sky, there

I am human in no way, shape, or form. I do not fit the criteria.

I am not to think on my own. I do not have free will. I exist for him only.

I am his toy, his puppet, his doll.

I am not human.

I am a doll.

I am his doll.

1968, UK

While filmmaker Andy Milligan is persistently associated with his usual playground of Staten Island, with a regular stable of actors who participated in his ramshackle pictures and theatre projects, he did spend a year and a half in London from 1968 to early 1970, where he made five films with the production company Cinemedia.

As with his arrangement with 42nd St. theatre owner William Mishkin, who served as both producer and exhibitor of his films in New York, Cinemedia was owned by the same parent company that ran the Soho theatres where Milligan's films habitually played in London.

The first of these five films was Nightbirds (originally called Pigeons), which was long thought lost until Milligan biographer Jimmy McDonough sold the only known 35mm print to filmmaker and exploitation movie champion Nicolas Winding Refn, who set about restoring it for a BFI Flipside release.

Nightbirds stars Berwick Kaler in his screen debut (although he would go onto four more Milligan pictures before eventually landing on such popular British TV shows as Coronation Street and Auf Wiedersehn Pet) as the unfortunately-named Dink, a downtrodden former spoiled momma's boy who's run away from home and has been living on the streets.

He is approached by a looker named Dee (Julie Shaw), who he dubs a "Florence Nightingale of the streets" when she offers to take him home and give him something to eat.

Set in a squalid section of London's East End, the two hole up in Dee's one-room apartment and embark on a co-dependent sexual relationship.

But this relationship reveals itself to be rather one-sided, as he bares his soul to her, telling her of his troubled family life while she evades his questioning about her own background.

As their relationship intensifies they become more and more afraid of anything intruding on their bubble- or their 'castle' as they call it - and she is especially opposed to their going out during the daytime.

Jealousy becomes rife on both fronts: Dee is jealous of Dink's friend Mabel, a crass former prostitute who adopts a somewhat maternal relationship to Dink (despite her obvious sexual attraction to him), and Dink is none too pleased when he discovers Dee's "arrangement" with her sleazy Irish landlord.

They both want to isolate each other from friends and other outside influences, but Dee is clearly the dominant party; it turns out Dink's gone from one domineering woman (his mother) to another, but one with infinitely more power since she's introduced him to sensual pleasures and the illusion of love.

And while these kinds of sexual and emotional conflicts are familiar terrain to Milligan viewers, the tell-tale Milligan stamp is that Dee's predatory games are syphilitic in nature.

Much is made of Milligan's 'love him or hate him' reputation, but apologetic admonitions aside, Milligan is like a Stateside Jean Rollin, revisiting certain themes over and over throughout a singularly visionary career, with whatever minuscule budget may be available to him.

As with many of his films, predominant themes here include co-dependence, psychic vampirism, jealousy and bad blood.

With its two leads commanding almost every scene together in a contained environment, the film also seems like an extension of Milligan's theatrical background.

Although Milligan's films are routinely categorized as horror, Nightbirds is not a horror film so much as a dishevelled nouvelle vague-type drama somewhere between Breathless and Last Tango in Paris, and a predecessor to genre-defying films like Simon Rumley's Red White & Blue.

And since the rambling nouvelle vague approach implies an inseparability from its historical, geographical and social context, it's interesting to note that the London of Nightbirds isn't swinging as much as clinging desperately to life.

Sure, Dee might have white lipstick and Dink a sideswept part, but aside from these visual signifiers of the era's fashions, clearly London wasn't swinging for everyone.

1994, New Zealand

Based on the true story of 1950s teenage murderesses Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning film (which launched the career of Kate Winslet) uses the real Pauline Parker's diary entries as a narrative guide through this lovely and horrific tale of a consuming friendship that results in both emotional and physical casualties.

When the outspoken, world-travelled Juliet (Winslet) is admitted as a new student at the Christchurch Girls' High School, misfit fellow student Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) immediately takes a liking to her, and the two become fast friends, bonding over their respective childhood illnesses and flights of fancy.

Pauline in particular is woken out of her previous despondency by Juliet's effervescent nature, and in between frantic bouts of social obstinacy, pushing aside all the normal boring people who obstruct their wilding ways, they create their own fictional kingdom of Borovnia, which Jackson brings to life in elaborate fantasy sequences that are as vivid for us as they become for the two dramatic teens.

Juliet's cheery, freewheeling nature has its dark side, fuelled by the tuberculosis that has seen her shipped off to various corners of the globe in search of an accommodating climate.

This, combined with the transient nature of her father's work and her mother's affair with a client (later to become Juliet's stepfather, Bill Perry) has left her feeling unbalanced, like an appendage or afterthought in her parents' lives.

As the mythology of Borovnia starts to get more violent, and their parents question the propriety of their girls' relationship - noticing their sociopathic irritability toward all other people - the elders contrive to keep them apart, "to avert trouble before it starts".

But the girls have other plans, most notably for Pauline's mother, who they see as their greatest obstacle to being together.

In her diary, Pauline details their plan to murder her, which proves their undoing after they bludgeon her to death in the woods.

The murder itself takes up a tiny fraction of the film's running time, but its spectre haunts the proceedings, imbuing the girls' co-dependent friendship with an irreconcilable sense of tragedy.

The media attention surrounding the film's release exposed acclaimed murder-mystery writer Anne Perry as the real-life Juliet Hulme, now living under her stepfather's name in Scotland.

In Dana Linkiewicz's documentary Anne Perry: Interiors (2009), the reclusive author describes being terrified that Pauline would take her own life, participating in the murder because she felt trapped by her loyalty to her friend.

Cold turkey

Did we talk about him being co-dependent before? I feel like we have, he says it here as well!

He talked about it before, during SDCC. I posted this video back then 😁😁: