Author S. K. Nicholas

The trees are the same as the streets and the same as all those faces that gulp for air while pretending this is what we hoped for when we were children. There were no wars back in our infancy, only cartoons and toys and the promise of weekends playing computer games drinking Coke. The threat of sex was distant, as was the philosophy of death. My body was hollow, as was my brain. No cancer for trembling fingers, no illness whatsoever. Baby teeth for tooth fairies was the closest I got to mortality. Drunk on dreams of ghosts and of starring in my own movie involving aliens, time-travel, and a girl next door, Sunday afternoons were a thing of wonder, not of dread. My favourite memory is of running beneath a sky full of snow to my friend’s house to play Donkey Kong after school. It was winter, and yet the sky was so bright with clouds on the verge of bursting. No tomorrow, and no fear, only one intense moment where nothing else mattered. No bills to pay, and no people to impress. No women to fail, and no embarrassing truths- just an evening of creation where time was of no interest. And then came women, and then came alcohol, and then came work and rules and war and class and cigarettes and social etiquette and death and death and death. Oh, to be a boy in love with his Nintendo again without a care in the world other than when that girl next door was going to show her face. Every written word is an attempt to get back; it’s a way of denying the status quo so I don’t end up like the rest of those useless fuckers that seem to be in love with the nature of imitation. In awe of their repetitious ways, they get laid thinking it’s never happened to anyone else, and by god will they tell us how it makes them feel. But it’s so fucking useless and yet they don’t see how it’s nothing. They think this is it, but it isn’t. There’s so much more, but they can’t be bothered to look further than their own misshapen noses to see what’s out there. How I wish I could give myself to a way of being that would allow freedom from the shame of what I am not, and from all that is now lost, but it isn’t to be. Dreaming of that endless night beneath those ripened clouds of snow, the moment still exists. Hearing my heart beat within my chest, and seeing the frozen air escape my mouth, we all hold keys to better ways of being, but only the few know the doors that are worth opening, and those that hold nothing behind them save for placebos.

A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon.co.uk

A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon.com