Author S. K. Nicholas

The frame that captures your face. The mirrors that reflect the beauty of what you are. All those lonely roads, seeping from the corners of your eyes, drowned in time and lost adolescence. Relics of memories. Like particles of dust, drifting without words. Immersed in daydreams, I’m too tired to be coherent. To drift is far easier. To let the words come with no pretence. To let them flow with no desire to impress. These words sell nothing, they just exist. I want to drink myself under the table. I haven’t been stupidly drunk in months. I miss ordering shots at the bar. I miss smoking outside in the cold, chatting shit I won’t remember in the morning. When I go out, I want nothing more than to drink heavily and talk about fantasies. The idea of using it as some mating ritual appals me. On the occasion when I’ve been chatted up, I’ve walked off. I can’t be bothered with drunken desire. It reeks of banality and cheapness. In the words of someone long since gone, I’d rather make love to a washing machine than go out looking to get drunk and fuck.

The way she follows me, in dreams and shadow. Upon the leaves of trees, and in every mouthful of beer. In the middle of a conversation at work, her face appears and strikes me dumb. The scent of her perfume, the scent of her hair. Smiles and sunshine, dazzling and true. In objects and sound, the nature of her cause bends itself against my will. Holding on, the energy she exerts won’t let go. It covers like a blanket, showering me with kisses. Her arms call me back home to a place without light, where darkness is all you could ever wish for. Away from everything, just two souls swimming together in nothingness. This is what she brings in the blink of an eye. No physical trace remains of our encounter save for the quickening of my heart. Where I end, and she begins, there’s no way of knowing.

With sleep closing in, my body winds down. The streets outside are dark, and the monsters of my mind alert. All the towns and cities of the land, calling to me from afar. All the broken dreams and unearthed graves, the pathways and buildings. All that emptiness, just wanting to be found. All those yesterdays, those moments of beauty and magic, left dangling in the wind. My mind is everywhere, no surface untouched. The fragments that dance; that wrap themselves around me just like her. Serpents and moons. Empty shopping trolleys and abandoned vehicles, collecting nothing but despair as somewhere on the horizon, life is a frenzy of flashing lights and dilated eyes. Of honey and saxophones. In moments of ecstasy when all is alive with fire and wine. Slipping into another realm as I succumb to the sadness of everything, I know that this time tomorrow, I’ll be fine. With alcohol coursing through my veins, I’ll lose myself just like the rest of them. Disappearing not into sleep, but into danger zones. The haunting labyrinth where there’s nothing to cling to save for madness.