Two Days, Then Gone

The bathroom cabinet is always the most honest room in a stranger’s apartment. I’ve had a handful of friendships that existed entirely in that register—picked up in a club or at a friend’s house party, burning for two or three days of pizza, weed, Netflix, conversations that went nowhere and everywhere—and then gone. I never tried to hold onto them. That’s not what they were for.

What I liked about those stretches was the total access. The way spending 48 hours in someone’s space tells you more about them than months of ordinary socializing ever could. Their clothes, their face at noon, the arrangement of products on the bathroom shelf. I’d absorb everything and then quietly dissolve back into the city. It sounds cold written down. It never felt cold.

Pascale from Hong Kong reminds me of one of those people. The Australian photographer David Collier found her in Marrickville and spent some time with her—photographing her asleep, in the shower, rolling a joint—with that quality of closeness that feels earned rather than staged. Looking at the pictures, I felt that old pull. Find someone like this again. A club, a café, a friend’s party. Order pizza. Never see each other again.