Author S. K. Nicholas

Watching Shaun of the Dead, I’m wishing for the end of the world so I don’t have to go to work tomorrow. If everything fell apart, I’d stay in bed working on the journal until it matched what’s in my head and my heart. Granted, there would be no one left to read it, but the sense of pride in having crafted something from nothing would dull the pain I’m sure. This whole thing has become an obsession, and I feel a bit like Van Gogh eating his oil paints beneath a starry sky in an attempt to become something more. There’s no urge to hack my ear off, though, not just yet. I’m far too squeamish for such acts of brutality. But the need to be consumed by emotion is overwhelming. Years ago, the days escaped me; they slipped through my hesitant fingers, and in many ways they still do. Life is passing me by, but it’s not the life I’m after. Maybe it was. Maybe there was nothing more I wanted than to be like those around me, and yet the older I get, the more I realise those same people are alien to me. Their ways of being sunlight to my moonlight; their joys like tap water as I wish to be drenched in droplets of rain bigger than bowling balls. It’s funny how things end up. How we begin with a certain destination in mind only to realise there’s no destination at all. It gets lonely at times, and there’s a cloud hanging over me that never seems to shift, and yet in spite of everything, I can’t help but smile at the seeds of beauty that continue to flower before my eyes. They dance like a lover on the shore of some town that’s been hiding away in the back of my foolish mind or a beggar who’s found a stash of something good to take him through another night. Maybe it’s love, or maybe it’s an illusion brought on by too much wine. Maybe it’s the dream of a boy wanting to wake in the morning not fearful of the very air that circulates his tired lungs. Whatever the outcome, you get the picture.