Wiping the rain from my face, I glimpse blades of grass dancing around centuries-old gravestones. In my madness, the slithers of green are the kids I went to school with, and the leaves blowing around them the gyrating hips of an ex-lover—the spiralling movements indicative of my precarious mental state that seems to rise and decline with the same regularity as my chest. The air goes in. Then out. Then in. Then out. The gravestone nearest to me is nearly two hundred years old. I can grasp this, and yet, on the other hand, I can’t. Nothing makes any sense to me. Poetry comes close, but the further away I move from the magic of words, so the strangeness wraps around me like a giant hand made of sand in the midst of yet another fever dream. Sticking out my tongue, I taste the rain. It tastes of old fashioned English desperation; of neglected council estates and buses with broken windows winding down endless country lanes cutting through fields the way the blade of a razor tears through flesh. The rain also tastes of eroding coastal towns and the piers that were once the jewel in their crowns, now aching relics of a time abandoned by those who once worshipped at their altar. The subtle nuances of despair remind me I’m alive. The same goes for the sight of the leaping leaves and bending blades of grass. It’s a small moment, but if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that the small moments outweigh the big ones a thousand times over and should be treated not with indifference, but a sense of respect usually reserved only for those that look good in photographs.

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