Getting out the shower, I contemplate masturbation, but before I have the chance, there’s news of a bomb. I think it’s a bomb? But then again, it might not be. Whatever it is, it’s in Beirut. It’s being shown on repeat on TV. The constant flowering of the mushroom-like cloud of debris reminds me of a flowering vulva. It’s not one I’ve ever seen, but have imagined since the days of my childhood before I even knew what a vulva was. Although I’m excited, the thought of all those dead bodies makes me as soft as a melted lollipop. Not that a melted lollipop is soft, but you catch my drift. How many people have died since I was born, I wonder? In that span of decades, how many lovers have had their heart’s broken? How many have brushed this heartache under the carpet, and how many have used such despair to fuel great works of art that have the capability to change the way we see the world? All things begin as seeds, from universes and the stars within them that resemble freckles on the face of a toothless kid, to the ideas in the mind of a scatterbrain always seeking the key to a door that may or may not exist. The news reporter says there could be over a hundred dead. Someone else says it wasn’t a bomb but incorrectly stored chemicals. We are all incorrectly stored chemicals, for if God truly loved us, he wouldn’t have left us here to suffer the way we do. Would he? Stroking my cock, I block out the thought of all those limbless dead bodies and instead think of her on a golden beach, and the way her hips sway to the music of the waves. The grains of sand that carry to her in the water that laps the shore are the same ones that observed the dinosaurs. Perhaps, if she were to squint, she could make out fragments of their remains, still around after so many years. If she were to pick them up, their tiny roars would echo in the palm of her hand, and in the shell of her ear.

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