Author S. K. Nicholas

There are no lights, only the smoke that drifts through the open window and the ever present fear of cancer. Sometimes testicular, sometimes bone and marrow. There are no lovers, either, only phantoms and mouths that beg to be kissed in the early hours of the morning, only when you go to kiss them, you realise they’re not real, and you can’t get back to sleep so you just lie there wondering what it would be like to go blind. Sometimes, you abuse yourself thinking of a woman who you’d love to hold in your arms and spoon, but the rest of the time, you’re trying to get your head around dying, but it just won’t work. It shouldn’t be anything to fear, because when it takes you away, you won’t know a thing. You won’t be. In a state of unbecoming for billions of years, you gasp for air, and then the darkness takes you back again. In an instant, we live, and then it’s over. Why can’t it last forever, though? Why can’t we keep killing time until there’s no time left to kill? Why doesn’t anything seem to fit the way it used to? There are, of course, no answers. One day, I shall be no more, and it will be both a disaster and a blessing. To escape from pain shall be a victory, but to never again feel the sun on my face makes me quake with fear. To never again walk through the streets in a state of turmoil while trying to balance the forces of the past and present- yeah, it brings on palpitations until I’m curled into a ball beneath a bush in someone’s front garden- but it’s all so beautiful. Head in hands, and tongue between teeth, there’s only failure and the wish to be like those around me who seem so indifferent to everything save for how they look in the eyes of others. Why couldn’t I have been made that way instead of the wreckage I resemble? Oh, let me be like them, just let me be anything other than this.