Weeds (George Daniel/Matty Healy)

2: "look down."

The air was warmer: sickly sweet. Still, it felt false, as if the world was still pretending. As if everything and everyone was forever fake. Every effort cast into the perpetuation of an endless charade. A charade, however, that remained cloaked in an uncertain, impenetrable mystery.

Above, the sky lay an astringent shade of blue: cutting deep and leaving permanent scars in the pattern of long lost whispers. The words they dared not to speak anymore. The part of themselves they'd lost in the cold, in the empty mornings, in the pliant, half-hopeful smiles. The part they cared not to get back.

Perhaps it had all been a facade all along. He stared up at her with dark eyes blown wide, as if he needed to take that spirit and smile from her and draw it deep inside himself to finally feel whole again. He didn't doubt it might break her, but that served no hindrance at all.

He focused instead upon her as a whole - on her better aspects: on her hair gleaming like copper in the midday sun. Yet still, as beautiful as it was, as pretty as she was, copper simply was not gold. It was fruitless. Eternal grey skies. They were condemned - like sinners at hands from above - to live like this, forever.

Fervent, she proceeded, living out the hour as if the boy before her regarded her with more than placid contempt. Under the light, under the heat of the midday sun, she left the world to its own issues and concerns, and kissed him.

Desperate, they receded. From sixteen, to the children they once were: young and dumb and innocent, playing out in the sun, in the grass and dirt. They closed their eyes and clung to the illusion; for they were forever young, as long as their hearts declined to beat.

She pulled away as the sky darkened - blue fading out to grey. Her eyes flickered tentatively across his face, searching for any hope of something more: any emotion inflicted by her actions, anything she could grasp onto. Something they could hold out in their hands. Something they could call their own.

There was nothing. Nothing at all.

She sunk down from her tiptoes as the sun ducked behind a cloud, throwing her head back against the wall - the back of the Geography classroom - before taking in a sigh.

Conversation eluded them. Yet they found no reason to chase after it. He stretched his head back, tipping dark, protruding eyes up to the sky: taking in the sudden overcast rain, and making love to every single shade of grey. He was thankful, in earnest.

It was a sign, of some degree; the world telling him to give up, to give in. That this wasn't perfect, that nothing would ever be. Yet despite that, despite everything, he still didn't quite have the guts to go through with it.

He stared at her: auburn hair growing mottled and dark with the rain - no longer a glistening copper, but a leaden brown at best. Eyes vacant, to the floor, to her feet, sinking into the soil: black shoes - patent leather, scuffed and dull with specks of dirt.

It was a sign. If there ever was one.

And still, he withdrew - joining her, with his back to the wall, brushing waterlogged curls from his cheeks as he stared out into the air, urging the rain to pass.

Droplets pounded upon the ground with the force of dozens of tiny fists, as if with the malice and intent to attack, to force some sort of confession from the shrunken, pleading ground. To beat a new, better world out of the broken earth. The rain was tired. The skies were ever-knowing, and ever-forgotten, resigned to their own disgust. At least, he knew, he was not alone.

He dug into his pocket, producing a slightly squashed packet of cigarettes. She turned her head, watching with wide, bloodshot eyes as he reached for the last cigarette, putting it to his lips, and stumbling with his lighter - struggling to light it in the rain.