My body, just like my mind, is covered with scars, like a blanket littered with cigarette burns, or the pockmarked face of a teenage kid, transitioning from childhood bliss to the limbo lands of adulthood. I keep picking at my scars, so they never, ever heal. My scars, you see, are my memories. My life a book; the page behind as important as the page ahead. The moments others consider gone or lost exist with the same ferocity as they did back when they first sprung into being like a frog leaping from the murky waters of a garden pond. I, too, am a frog, swimming in the oily discharge we call living. I haven’t seen a frog in years. Not a real one, anyhow. My mind wanders. It never settles for long, and yet to you it returns more often than it should. There must be a reason. Perhaps it’s a symptom of mental illness, or maybe it’s to do with something akin to fate. We are two souls who happened to brush shoulders in a universe accelerating faster than the speed of light. Whether by chance or design, I can’t quite decide, but either way, it’s the most beautiful thing I know, which is why I think of it as much as I do. And so to you, I return. My favourite scar, the one I never let heal. The wickedness of your kiss upon my skin as if yesterday were today, with today as real as the dirt beneath our fingernails as we crawl through the woods in search of each other’s light.

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