Inspecting her wiggling toes, her mind wanders further afield. Soon, she forgets all about the tug of war between sex and death. She even forgets about Pollock, and how one of his last paintings titled The Deep is the only painting she’s ever masturbated over—drunk on pink gin and sambuca after a night out in town doing her best to avoid the leering advances of dirty men by pretending to be asexual. Letting her mind escape through the curtains of the studio space and through the windows of the building that house her tremulous soul, she passes between the bars like an uncaged bird to the river behind her grandparents’ house. There, she flies low to the body of water with her outstretched arms resembling the magnificent wings of an eagle. As each one of her feathers tickles the worm of her soul, she can’t help but picture her mother’s womb, and how as much as she dislikes her mother, a part of her wishes to return to the body of the woman who carried her when she was but a spark in the darkness. Feeling the cold, night air upon the nape of her neck as the smell of seaweed makes her gag, she pictures herself as a newly fertilised egg. Such a state of being would’ve been the peak of her existence. So much promise. So much unwritten history. So many infinite branches of existence yet to traverse. At this precise moment when she was a seed yet to bloom, everything was in a state of perfect harmony that nothing could penetrate. Nothing that is, other than her mother who had to go and birth her into a world hellbent on sniffing her out the way a dog sniffs another dog’s arsehole.

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