There’s an X just below her navel, and even though they say it never marks the spot, I think in this instance, they got it wrong. If I put my ear to her belly, I hear insects. If I place my tongue upon the knee of her left leg, I taste every earthly delight that ever was. Her legs are covered in blemishes, and the lines around her eyes could be used to recreate a perfect geometric design of an extraordinary ordinary apartment in some sickly soulless upmarket borough of London, but a blemish isn’t a weakness. Our imperfections are worth perfecting, don’t you know? The second we iron out our creases, we wave a white flag and cease to exist. Look what happened when Bowie fixed his teeth. He was never worth looking at again. Keep your secrets. Own your sense of worthlessness as if it belongs to no one else but you because sometimes, it’s all we ever have before the hand of fate rears its ugly head and takes us away. It snatches us the way a gust of wind snatches a cigarette from the lips of a desperate mouth, or a beast whisks away a balloon from the clutches a child with two black eyes caused by daddy’s sorry fists. Life is an absurd carousel. We are all tiny animals, both oblivious yet fearful of the skies above. We must make the end wait its turn. We must embrace the wheel and turn with it, so that, in time, we become the wheel. Once we do, stars will flower in our lungs, and like fireworks, we shall shower those beneath with an incredible burst of the whitest of white light that makes the grey of these days tremble.

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