In these mailable hours where the town is a hive of twinkling, ghostly lights, you can’t help but feel on the cusp of something more. The streets are cold yet strangely alive with the smell of fried chicken, not to mention the exotic kiss of cigarettes perched upon the lips of lovers trawling through windswept alleyways in search of secrets that are theirs to keep. Mostly this place is known to me, but at this time of night, things have a habit of getting out of reach. Things shift and change, like faces gurning on the dance floor of a club in the city where the insects flock like flies to a prize turd. There’s an old school now a block of flats. It drowns in yesterday. You can hear dead children playing. They play and they play and they play, the echoes of their laughter ringing in my ears as the stars flicker in and out of existence as if it were no big deal. There’s graffiti on the walls of a subway. I don’t understand what it means. It’s poetry. It’s a desperate promise on chapped lips chewing at the moon as it glides from one side of my vision to the other. Stairwells. Corner shops. A chippy no longer a chippy now a nondescript store offering cash for gold. Gold against the soul. If I strain, I hear music. And broken promises. And drunken sweet nothings that litter the ground like trash. The world before my eyes ripples in the breeze, and as the tide comes and pulls me under, the outline around my body smears against the sky like fresh ink on a blank diary page.

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