There’s this strange, static sound rolling in from fields that, from a distance, resemble the sea. I can hear birdsong and the crashing of waves, or could it be the rustling of leaves belonging to a vast number of motherless trees? In a dream, I once wrote a book titled The History of Wind. Everyone who read it thought of me as quite insane. They knew the game I played, but not the rules, and so it remains. There is a path that wraps around a grassy hill, or could it be a knoll, like the one where the secret gunman fired his gun at JFK back in November ‘63? Covered in sun, it leads to the bright lights of the past, and although I’m scared of coming face to face with those I no longer know, I’d give anything to see their smiles again. Electricity pylons reach out to me as if wishing for a dance, but I’ve two left feet and so make my excuses and leave. There’s nowhere to go, and so all I do is walk around in circles looking for a door that doesn’t exist. Through a meadow and then around a winding path, there are steep, stone steps. Old, stony, bony steps reeking of history and piss; of moss and creepy crawlies that are the same creepy crawlies from the lazy days of childhood bliss. Snails. Caterpillars. Earwigs. Haven’t seen an earwig in years. Perhaps they’re all nestled away in pornos hidden in rotten garden sheds. Once they were brand new like the morning sky, but nothing ever stays the same. Not the sky, nor the stars that inhabit it. Not even my precious memories, for they change shape more times than my heart. The bodies in those tatty pages are relics. We’re all relics, whether we like it or not. Like the tingly fizz of flesh making way for the faint odour of shame that lingers on fingers the morning after the night before, or the spark we seek in the dark, trailing far behind us as we lose our way drifting closer to harm.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US