There was a time when the time before this slipped out to sea. Now it laps my feet, tickling my toes and inviting me to lose my mind. To ruminate. To obsess. To become one with the shadows that caress these bones that were once smaller than atoms. Sometime, in the murky future, I’ll drift about random streets the same as the snow from my childhood, formless. Without chains. I see it clearly. Even on a warm summer’s day, I feel icy flakes on my pale cheeks—can see the swollen sky burn with winter light. In it, I’m just a five-year-old kid sticking his tongue out trying to eat the cold magic falling from above. I don’t ever wanna lose this moment, so I get drunk and forget everything else. I don’t want company, and nor do I wish to be alone. I write words that might as well be me pissing in the wind. Situations change, but the meaning behind these words stays the same—they can and will betray the mask of the heart. And so I breathe in. When I breathe out, I’m in High Wycombe. My university days. On some obscure, Friday night, stumbling back from town in the early hours, eating cheesy chips, several sheets to the wind with a girl on my mind who’s now just another shadow on the wall. I’m caught in a perpetual wave. One that rises ten miles high each time I go to sleep. As my eyes flutter under the weight of my dreams, I see a future with no humour, one where we are automatons one and all—the only way out being the footsteps leading to love.

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