Author S. K. Nicholas

As I enter the indoor market, there’s a stall that once sold an abundance of socks. Just socks. In all shapes and sizes. The old couple who used to run it are now dead and buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of town. Never knew their names, just their wrinkly faces. The stall doesn’t sell socks anymore. Now it offers mobile phone cases. Hundreds upon hundreds of the fuckers displayed in a wall of lurid colour. Somewhere at the end of the stall, some middle-aged man sits on a chair eyeing up potential buyers. He eyes me up, and I nonchalantly eye him in return before moving on. There’s a hairdresser further along where I would get my locks shaved off as a kid. The Forrest Gump look was all the rage back in ’94, and for five quid, I too could resemble a dim-witted but loveable Tom Hanks. There are other places as well, but they hold no meaning to me. Those around come and go. They speak but the words fall to the floor the second they leave their blabbering mouths. What will this place resemble a thousand years from now? Will there be anything left of this time, or will it all be ruins? I hope it’s ruins, and I hope the animals use it as their playground not caring or aware of our previous demise. Will my bones be in the cemetery along with the old sock people, or will my atoms be floating around somewhere in the sky with yours? Floating with you is my hope. Just floating for all eternity. The smell of fried food is in the air. It makes me stop what I’m doing and realise how hungry I am. This stupid body. It bores me with how predictable it is. Wish I was a ghost already, and that I could float on over to you right now and haunt you something rotten. Ordering a jacket potato, I sit in the corner of some greasy spoon with my back to the wall imagining the whole area filled not with concrete and people but with trees and rivers. Before the meal is even half in my belly, the place is long gone, and I’m already with you, up there in the stars looking down on everything and laughing at how trivial it is. And you laugh just the same as I do, and even though we don’t know what’s out there, we don’t care, because we have each other, and that’s all it’ll ever be about.

A Journal for Damned Lovers Volumes 1 & 2 on Amazon.co.uk

A Journal for Damned Lovers Volumes 1 & 2 on Amazon.com