Author S. K. Nicholas

Go for a drive someplace where you’re not known, like the lonely roads you haven’t seen since the years of your youth. From afar, the reservoir glistens like a dream, as do the canals and windows of all those buildings that are slowly sinking into the ground inch by inch, year after year. The way your headlights play hide and seek among the trees. The way you pull into a layby and touch yourself while drinking vodka. It’s sad and it’s seedy but all the same, it’s liberating in ways no one else could know. You don’t believe in God, per se, but you know there’s something, and whenever you’re far removed from the presence of others, you can feel it calling to you through the silence on nights such as these. Do you remember those toys people would stick on the inside of their cars? They were all the rage when I was a kid back in the early 90’s. Fluffy things that resembled Garfield with suckers on their hands and feet you would lick before pressing against the window. On childhood trips to the seaside, there would be row after row of stools and shops selling these things along with other such tat. It makes me smile to think of those days now, just the same as it makes me smile imagining you looking up at the moon so cherub-faced and wide-eyed. It’s weird, isn’t it? Y’know, how time keeps drifting from our hands before coming back and kissing us on the neck. Weird and strange. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think of you. Truth be told, you don’t mean as much to me as you used to, but you’re with me at all times, and in the quiet hours when nothing else exists, you are more than a lover in ways I would never have guessed. Is it spiritual? Or a symptom of mental illness? Personally, I hope it’s both. Taking another swig from your bottle, you screw the cap back on and place it in the glovebox before sitting there with both hands on the steering wheel. You’re a long way from home, but where is that exactly? Is it in the bed of the one you’re sleeping with right now, or is it in a place you haven’t stepped foot in for years? Or is it out there, somewhere among the fields and rivers you find yourself drawn to at the same time each evening? In silence, you keep your gaze hoping deep down there will be a day when at long last you’ll find what you’re looking for.

A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon.co.uk

A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon.com