There’s graffiti on the walls in the toilets. Would’ve taken a cubicle, but they’re overflowing with shit. At the urinal, I look up to the ceiling clenching my teeth and notice the window above my head is cracked and fractured like the web of a spider. I think of Charlotte’s Web, then of Roald Dahl, sitting in his little chair with his withered legs covered by a blanket. Whatever happened to Sophie Dahl? Those days when her mammary glands were splashed across the pages of all the newspapers seem just like yesterday. Everything seems just like yesterday. The scrawled words on the wall say stuff, but I’m too far gone to decipher what they mean. The reflection in the mirror is me. It’s weird, though. I’m whipped up in a frenzy yet still feel dead. Piss splashes my Converse. Hopping about like a rabbit, I notice someone’s done a few lines of coke next to the sink. The remnants of their high are faint but there for me to see as clearly as I see the pupils of Sophie’s almonds eyes. Closing mine, I’m reminded of snow. Kisses in the snow beneath a bridge that exists at all points in time. The nucleus of my memories. The reasons for being seem so underwhelming at times. Like the purgatory days that follow Christmas or the empty seconds that exist after sex without an ounce of love. Twitching like a dreaming dog, I glimpse snow in the garden while prowling the living room floor in my nappy. Snow on the fur of a leaping cat, once leaping into thin air now leaping through heavenly clouds. Everything is lost. Everything blurred. I can barely piss straight through the confusion flowing through my veins, and the second I’m back at the bar along comes a shot of something sour to take it all away.

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