In the early hours, I remember leaves hitting the windows of the bus as it passed from leafy town to leafy town, with time of no consequence to anyone. I remember the mittens on your hands as the fireworks overhead blossomed the same as your body as we showered together not long after we finished work; hungry for each other as well as the food we had brought still sitting on the kitchen worktop wrapped in plastic carrier bags. I remember the bluebells leading to my grandmother’s house, and how the smell of her home still to this day reminds me of what it feels like to belong. I haven’t felt such a thing in so long. She’s been dead for half my life. Her mum was the mum who had a premonition about the Titanic sinking. Words were exchanged over a garden fence one April evening, the nature of which continues to live in my mind a century on. Sometimes, I get the feeling that when they died, the future died with them, and I am nothing more than the echo of a half-remembered dream. Funny. When we showered, you chattered your teeth and buried your head beneath my chin as the beads of water dripped from your breasts to my cock. The water was too cold because I forgot to put on the immersion heater, yet we had to wash because we stunk from sleeping with our clothes on for several days straight. After eating, we fucked to the soundtrack of the void, and when your fingers dug into my skin as dead stars kissed us through the window of my old bedroom, my heart was yours, and your heart was mine, the lines of our bodies indivisible even to us.

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