At four in the morning, I wipe the smegma from beneath my foreskin dreaming of a door situated in the guts of a girl I used to date back in high school. She could be dead now for all I know, but in my mind, she shines as bright as the mid ‘90s. She most likely is dead. Not in the physical sense, but in a practical one. As soon as the adult world sniffed her out, it robbed her of her innocence; of whatever magic she had left from our time together before puberty placed a wall between us that neither one of us would ever be able to scale. The wall in question is covered with gum and a plethora of scrawled words lewd in nature. It’s situated beyond the bridge next to the McDonald’s where the kids in my hometown take their young loves to show them just how much they mean to them, and just how much they want a glimpse of a fleshy wonder. I’ve been there a few times myself. The last of which was back in the days when I wasn’t working. The money I spent I got cap in hand from the government. I didn’t feel bad spending it on junk food and cigarettes, because I’ve always felt that England has owed me a living. Not just England, either, but life. I never asked to be born, and not a day goes by when I don’t resent the fact that I was stirred from my cosmic slumber, forced to walk the catwalk of life full of shame at being paraded this way. If I close my eyes, I see the alleyways I walked as a kid that are no longer there, and people I spent so much of my time with who I haven’t seen in years, and none of it feels real at all. The past is abolished. Memory becomes myth. What I’m left with is a sterilised future where the truth of where I’ve been will never be seen again. Fuck Picasso, btw. Fuck him for being so perfect at his art, and for being in love with life while here I am, a slug on the ground waiting for someone to put me out of my misery. Drown me in salt. Squish me like a spider. Scrunch me up in a dirty tissue and chuck me out the window so that the eternal winds take me to the stars that lie beyond these dim and dreary planes.

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