After you moved out I cried and cried and then I built a shoe shelf. I took down the framed photos of our horse rides and Indian buses and temples and I put up all the shoes I owned, I’d forgotten I had so many, especially the heels that you would laugh at when I put them on to make you want me. Take that off, that’s not you, you look like a bar girl. It had been in my best interest to forget these shoes and so I had but when you left and I was alone in our apartment with the Saigon night beneath my windows I dug them out again. I also dug out the cheap counterfeit vodka we’d bought from the ice cream cart and my red Marlboros and all my music. I listened to Cold Cave nonstop. I shopped like mad. I went to all the markets and bought tiny shorts and t-shirts. I was manic and skinnier than ever. You came back. Several times. Once you said you needed the WiFi. You were always drunk. You'd come after the bars had shut on Bui Bang, the last one shut at three, and I’d get out of bed, fortified with anger, and let you in. You slept on the sofa. In the morning you were always gone, and never a word, not even a text. I wouldn’t hear from you until the next time, and then the next time stopped happening. Maybe you’d stopped drinking. I hadn’t. In the hot sweet night I’d drink vodka on the balcony with the same song blasting over and over again from the speakers on the flat screen that had come with the apartment. The vodka tasted like rubbing alcohol and entered my veins like electricity. The city glittered with promise. When I was drunk enough I’d take the elevator down to the steaming streets and get on the back of a xe om, a different driver every time, I had to walk several blocks to make this happen. Drunk on bad booze and my demonization of you I’d whizz through the districts and feel that everything was possible. My hair was great. The palm fronds whooshed in the tropical winds and the air smelled of jasmine and burning chilli oil and garbage. I wore pink lipstick. I read Sex at Dawn, I read Mating in Captivity, I read The Ethical Slut. I decided it wasn’t us, it was monogamy. I listened to seven podcasts a day and bought my flights to America. I remembered everything I’d had to forget if I wanted to stay with you and then I ran into you buying steamed fucking buns at Circle K.