Documentaries on YouTube regarding folding time and space while scoffing a burger, drunk and in love with the memory of you falling into some bushes after a bender in town. As the memory sparks, locusts try their best to get in through a gap in the window. The world is collapsing. Darkness deepens on the horizon, with stars shining brightly before red shifting to infinity like the eyes of long-dead grandparents disappearing into the sullen, Welsh night. The bushes you fell into are opposite the church. Cats sleep there. Luckily for them, however, the night you fell, they were elsewhere, no doubt on some grand adventure in the woods where I myself roam in search of something with no name. They say space is like Pac-Man. That if you move far enough to the left, you reappear on the right. It’s a bit like life, in that no matter how far away you move from something, one way or another, you can’t help but end up right where you started. Or, should I say, right where you belong. The documentaries come and go while remaining entrenched in the nature of the universe. Closing my eyes, I hear the ringing bells of the church but can’t work out whether they’re real or imagined. Not that it matters. Either way, that I hear them is proof that they exist, and as I imagine them swinging back and forth high above the town, I picture you sleeping. To begin with, you’re tucked up in bed, all nice and cosy beneath a warm duvet, but soon enough, you’re in the bushes with the cats as they lick your face as if you’re one of them. Your heart is feral and scarred and makes music like no other. It’s why I continue to seek you out when it’s so easy to let go of everyone else.

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