“Come hold me,” she says, and just like that, I snap from my fugue state and wrap my arms around her waist.

“Do you want to go out? Or shall we stay in and watch the world go by?”

Her question isn’t a question at all. Neither of us wishes to go out. There’s enough beer to see us through the entire evening, and although running light on food, we won’t yet starve. Although saying that, Meeko’s appetite is unmatched by any I have ever known, so a late-night stroll to a fast-food joint might be in order, especially if we drink our way through the beer. With my hands placed on her belly, I rest my chin on her shoulder as she leads me over to the window with the tiniest steps you can imagine. The sun is God, and as it paints us with its eternal, knowing light, life doesn’t feel so bad—not as bad as it usually does, anyhow.

“What do you see?” she asks.

What I observe are grey and crumbling buildings and streets snaking this way and that like some monstrous, Leviathan-esque umbilical cord, choking the planet as if amid a sex game gone horribly wrong. Moving upon these streets are little dots that are people resembling insects scurrying about in a blind panic, their directionless existence so plain to see. The music coming from below is changing by the minute yet forever remaining the same, while the smell of chargrilled chicken is as delicious and as tempting as ever. There are other smells too, some equally as intoxicating, others less so. I can’t see these things, but they shape the surroundings accordingly. Also unseen yet felt is the stink of dirty sidewalks and the stench of unwashed human skin. If I blink my eyes, I can make out the wispy smoke spewing from the exhausts belonging to cars stuck in numerous traffic jams and the suffocating gas of human despair that floats to the sky like steam escaping from manhole covers, ever-worsening and ever silent.

“I see everything and nothing,” I say.

“Ever the cryptic,” she replies.

“If I want, I can view paradise, or, I can glimpse purgatory. It depends on what mood I’m in. Either this window is a window to small miracles or a premonition of the decay that will one day eat this world alive.”

“Alright, Mr Morbid,” she huffs.

“It’s true,” I continue, “and the worst thing is, is that no matter how many ways you look at it, one day all that we see and feel will be nothing but dust.”

“I wish I never asked,” she grumbles.

Gently pinching her skin, I kiss her on the ear and breathe her in.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US