It’s a slow day. The kinda day for a slow suicide. The kinda day that has a sky ready to piss all over your hungover head. Grey this. Grey that. The corpse of a fox haunts, as does the image of a bruised baby with broken limbs on page fourteen of some paper or other. The pages beforehand are dedicated to big tits, celebrities and bent politicians, all of whom are useless. Like witches. Like prophylactics. I think of women, but only one. A single cigarette leads to twenty. A tsunami in Tonga reminds me of the one in Haiti. We’re already dead. Some are resigned to it. Few fight it. Those that do, do what they can to breathe a little life before they’re beaten while the rest are so comatose they don’t even realise they’re here to begin with. I feel like Franklin in his wheelchair from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m squirming while the rest of them carry on regardless. I play a guitar with no strings—sing songs with no words. It’s all so beautiful and all so sad. We pick and choose our history. We erase ex-lovers the same way we flick crumbs off a plate. To the many, if it doesn’t fit with their way of seeing things, then it doesn’t exist. But it does because it has. It always will. We all go back, and it hurts. Everything hurts. We endure a thousand days of monotony just to live for a single moment of beauty, like a butterfly in an autumn breeze, reaching for the sun somewhere between the garden shed and the tapdancing feet of your lover as they await your kiss on the steps leading to a secret garden in a secret heart. The fox’s flesh rots away to reveal bones. The bones turn to dust as its spirit dashes and darts down the aisles of a supermarket where hours turn to years and people become machines.

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