The black hole at the centre of the universe blinked at me from my phone first thing in the morning. At 4am, it beckoned all seductive like. The breath in my lungs was nowhere. I thought about not moving. Calling in sick and vegetating in bed for the day, crippled by the fear of collapsing stars and all that shit. Didn’t happen. But I wanted it to, I really did. I went in. The place was a hive. Time sped past. Several coffees and a sea of blank faces later, I ventured into a parking lot blistered by the hateful sun. I felt like a turd, boiling on the sidewalk. The tiny rocks beneath my shoes crunched as I passed through. My shoes, worn. Comfortable, but worn. The parking lot, situated next to the old library I once worked at. The library is now a patch of land, nothing more than weeds. When I close my eyes, the weeds reach up to the brilliant sky. Everything is connected. String Theory, most likely. The past inside the present. Love and loss, curled together like sleeping dogs before a roaring electrical fire. If I close my eyes, I sniff out every version of me that has ever been. When I open them again, I spy some flowers tied to a lamp post by an elastic band. The flowers are dead. The same as the life they commemorate. Everything is cheap and riddled with decay, but here I am, alive in an age that will never come again.

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