I’m not a man. I’m not sure what I am, but it’s not a man. I’m just some kid who got lost along the way. Like that one in Flight of the Navigator when he fell down a hill and woke up after several years not having aged a day, or one of the Lost Boys, yeah, I’m a lost boy drifting like a dream on the outskirts of a drowning town that should’ve been put out of its misery years ago. I’m no more than a discarded shopping trolley left to sit and ponder what might have been in a parking lot home to rusting recycling bins and old mattresses dumped in the dead of night by travellers whose kids set light to cars in the early hours because that’s how they get their kicks. All those memories and near misses. All that dead skin and those suspicious stains that tell a thousand stories without saying anything at all. Looking at myself in the mirror, I seem normal enough, yet my head is a pig pen. It’s a hive of madness and filth saturated with a sadness that rules each and every one of my actions. Melancholy is in my bones. I crawled from the soil of Welsh despair and never took flight. I’m in the mud, like a piggy, swimming in shit halfway between the gutter and the stars. Opening my mouth, I inspect teeth that have seen better days. Spreading my eyes with yellowed fingers, I see blood vessels and a lack of sleep. My hair’s going grey, and I’m badly out of shape, and yet my realm is that of imagination so what can I do. The human story bores me. I want to be a soul, and yet it’s like nothing I do helps change the fact I’m fading and not even my stories can save me from oblivion. Above all, I wish to be beautiful, to shine the way a good soul does, and yet here I am, decaying and on the brink of despair as I always seem to be. Not even tea can save me. Not even alcohol. Could go for a walk. Should do something productive but I’ll probably just waste time doing not much of anything. I’ll probably light a smoke and think about the Elephant Man. Maybe I’ll watch the Lynch film and cry while doing my best to convince myself it’s not tears of emotion but rather just tiredness.
Author S. K. Nicholas 
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