So many moments in my life hang like clothes on a washing line—they drip and dance, not alive but as real as my mind allows them to be. In the garden, I transition from a child into a dying man in the time it takes a leaf to fall to the ground. The leaf is golden. As gold as butter on toast. Toast is my favourite food. I can cook it quite well. The crumbs get in my beard, but it’s okay. Everything is okay if you want it to be. Walking in circles on grass that’s as dry as burnt paper, I look at where a large tree once loomed. Only, it’s not there anymore. I can’t even say when it disappeared. I’m so confused. Confusion will be my epitaph. It riddles me like a bad case of indigestion. Like an apple in my throat from the second I wake to the minutes when I slip away to the digital sound of rain. There once was a time when I slept in silence, now I equate silence with the slab. And I don’t want to be on the slab, not just yet. Lighting a cigarette, the smoke swirls around the invisible trunk of the invisible tree, and without even trying, I’m somewhere else entirely.

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