Months feel like weeks, and a handful of days is loose change slipping between drunken fingers on a night out in town. Most of what happens, I don’t recall. It was never here to begin with, and as the seconds come and go, the realness of what once was is reduced to mere shadow. My mind is littered with them, as is the world. Cigarette ash is a secret. Lipstick on pint glasses, an afterthought that only becomes real the morning after the night before when ghosts are alive in minds riddled like worm-infested wood. Petrified. Bashed to smithereens. In this pub, in the future, like a few weeks down the line, some kid will die. He’ll hit his head after a fall. I’ll see a cop car the night after walking back from hers, a lingering something that will one day mean nothing. Nothing, as it happens, ever makes much sense to me, but the smell of her hair is a constant. Like the memory of Sunday afternoons as a kid when the nausea of a Monday morning was less about the hell of a hangover, and more to do with the fear of detention at not having completed my homework. With one eye, I spy the remnants of my childhood, wallpapered over without a thought, and, with the other, tiny miracles in the here and now dismissed as worthless because they offer no financial gain, but for me, I worship at their altar.

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