Author S. K. Nicholas

Beneath the snow by the side of the road, there’s a promise of what you could be. A future butterfly. A bud waiting to shoot into some kind of new moon that will brighten these cold and biting days. Here and there, a bird comes down from the sky and looks about before returning up high. Sometimes, a bewildered looking cat will appear. They glance at me, and I glance back, and for a second, there’s a mutual understanding of our confusion before we go our separate ways. The town is so quiet. Everyone’s been told to stay indoors. There’s little traffic, and as such, the roads are eerily deserted, so much so that I take to walking down the middle of them because there’s less chance of slipping over. The colour of the sky is vaguely pink, and when I stare at it, I see an ocean of flowers and your smile. Your smile that still touches me the same as the music of Elliott Smith, or the memory of making love on a Sunday morning with the curtains drawn not caring for anything other than your embrace. If I could, I would fly into the clouds and never come down, and although it would be sad to leave people behind, to be free of these shackles would fill me with wonder. These humans, they bore me with their games, and they tire with their meek and mild obedience of how they think a life should be led. So the clouds it is. Maybe when I’m up there, I’ll see all the dead animals I’ve known, and they’ll no longer be dead but flying around on magic carpets. All of Sarah’s rats she used to own, they’ll be there, too. They’ll each have tiny magic carpets of their own, and we’ll just fly together not caring for anything else. And of course, little Bethany will be there, and in this ocean of flowers we lose ourselves in, they’ll be nothing but the magic of which I try so hard to capture in words. When I close my eyes, there are so many things that leave me blind. There’s a numbing sadness I can never seem to shake, and yet despite this, beauty is always with me. It itches at the tips of my fingers and plucks away at the strings of my beer-stained heart.

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

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