Jack and Ivy were horribly in love. They had the kind of reckless passion worthy of Romeo and Juliet comparisons. When they loved it was completely and when they hated it was to the teeth.

The first time they made love they were drunk and This Mortal Coil's song Velvet Belly was playing repeatedly on a stereo until Jack had said, "What the hell is this music?"

Ivy giggled and thought it was the coolest thing that they could talk and laugh while lying naked and entwined.

"I didn't hurt you did I, baby?" Jack said, biting her chin.

"No, but I know you're gonna break my little heart." Ivy was being coy at the time but truly, she couldn't have been more smitten.

It was one of those moments that gets burned into the landscape of your memory. A scene from your life that would flash like flickering fireflies in your head and you'd remember it for the rest of your life. The smell in the room. His pretty hazel eyes. The song on the stereo and that terrible bite of first love.

They gained a reputation as the biggest potheads you'd ever come across, though the term pothead is probably inaccurate since their drug of choice was actually hashish. Hash, weed, acid, they'd do just about anything you could smoke or swallow, pharmaceuticals being just as high on their list of fun ways to self-medicate.

They were 16-years-old and had the raging hormones to prove it. All they really did was fuck and get high and if they weren't doing that, they were asleep. It didn't help that they were hopped up on bennies most of the time.

Ivy's step-father beat on her when she was at home, so she spent very little time there. Mostly she'd sneak into Jack's room at night and if his disapproving adoptive parents happened to catch them, pitching a fit over their pubescent whoring, they'd sneak out and make cozy hiding spaces on building rooftops or under park picnic tables.

After several months of begging for scraps at the pizza place come the end of the night and then sleeping on park benches, Jack had had enough. He decided it was time they got their own place. He went to the welfare office and got himself an emergency check, enough money for first and last months rent and maybe a bit of food.

Ivy quit school and got a full-time job making sandwiches at a deli and Jack started hauling furniture for a moving company.

Suddenly their whole universe was all about paying bills, picking up groceries, doing laundry and getting up at the crack of dawn so they could make it into their shitty, minimum wage jobs on time. Between working double shifts and trying to figure out why the heat wasn't working in their basement apartment, they'd both forgotten to be a couple of falling down drug addicts.

It was then that a more lucid Ivy began to deal with the emotional fallout of having been physically and emotionally abused for the past ten years and Jack wished he could've been on Mars at the time; anywhere else but there.

Ivy had lost it completely. She began having nightmares. The kind where she'd wake up sweating, crying and cowering in the closet or even worse, running in circles in the middle of the living room screaming at the top of her voice. A shrill and heart stopping scream, it was enough to scare the holy-shit out of even the most hardened killers.

The sleep deprivation only compounded an already tense situation and it escalated quickly so they were fighting all the time. Bickering over little things when they were exhausted and irritable and then graduating to full on screaming, throwing, wrestling matches that left their cramped apartment in total disarray. Jack was never afraid to engage Ivy in their wicked fights but at the same time he felt the first real twinges of fear. He knew Ivy was broken and he just didn't know how to fix her.

Jack started doing drugs again, only this time he was secretly freebasing cocaine. It didn't take long for it to become a serious habit either. He lost his job in less than a month, sold off all his possessions, spent everything they had for rent and bills and when all the money was gone, he took up with a bad crowd of fellow crackheads who decided breaking into houses was a lucrative career move.

Ivy was scared as hell. It was her fault Jack was hardly ever home anymore. She'd pushed him away. He'd leave for days at a time and when he did come home, they'd only fight like hell, exchanging glances of the purest hate, until he'd leave again and Ivy felt more abandoned and alone than she ever had before.

It was over now. They both knew it. The only thing keeping them together was the sheer awe they felt at how swiftly they tore each other apart.

Jack was arrested for yet another break and enter and sentenced to eighteen months in a young offender detention centre.

Six months later Ivy killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills while listening to This Mortal Coil's Velvet Belly repeatedly on the stereo.