The residues of other people’s lives wrap around my bones like a second skin. I don’t know where they end nor where I begin. On my way to work, I walk past my childhood home. From age four to eighteen, life was poetry without even trying. These days I get blue so easily. There seems to be no helping it because life is an illness that keeps on giving. It was never like this as a kid, but when I transitioned into a man my every move and thought became tainted by the leering hand of loss. The death of pets. The death of grandparents. The loss of innocence that give rise to a lust for flesh when once the smile of a girl I liked didn’t prompt a boner but instead a wish to hold her hand in the playground. The playground of my old school is now a car park. The school not a school but council offices. The roads not smooth but full of potholes just as they were back then. Nothing ever changes, yet even when it does, it’s never for the best. This town. That town. They crumble like soggy cardboard boxes. That’s modern life for you in a nutshell. A soggy cardboard box kicked to bits beneath the stamping feet of drinkers and tramps making their way through an empty marketplace on some grey, Sunday afternoon stuck between the end and the beginning of nothingness.

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