Wrapped in a dressing gown, I’m standing on the doorstep watching the snow turn to rain then back to snow. The bright colour of the day has gone from the sky, and the droplets metamorphosing into snowflakes are each illuminated by the glow of the streetlight on the opposite side of the road. It’s a beautiful moment. Always will be, for even when it ends it will begin again, for life is a figure eight turned on its side, meaning there’s no escape from that which we have known before. It’s so cold I’ve taken to sleeping in my dressing gown wearing a scarf. Such an act surely carries with it the risk of accidentally strangling myself to death in my sleep. But at least I’ll be asleep. Like the little boy on Saddleworth Moor, buried there over fifty years ago by the murderous hands of Ian Brady. Imagine how lonely it must be having spent half a century feeling the wispy wind nibbling your bones as the ghost of your mother searches for you without luck. A short life of bliss followed by an eternity of nothingness. As the snow falls into the road, I suddenly have a desire to read Wuthering Heights. It’s my favourite book, but I haven’t read it in years. I’m drunk and romantic. The best and worst combination there is. Perhaps I’ll give it a read once I’m done with A Christmas Carol. Above the clouds, I make out the dim shiny lights of planes. Seeing them floating in the milky abyss, I think of strange gods. Gods resembling octopuses. Gods born from perverted thoughts, waiting for the tide to birth them into this life of mine, at which point they’ll drown me the way a crazed mother drowns her child in a torrid malaise brought upon by the weight of wishing for today not to be as bad as yesterday.

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