If I close one eye ever so slightly, I breathe in the stale air of a decade or so ago. No future without the past. No yesterday without the threat of tomorrow. My corporeal form is lame. Once dispersed, the light within dances. I pick my poison. I disturb the dust and grit my teeth as the snow outside surrounds her ballerinaesque body. Her laughter, childlike with a lick of salt, is as known to me as my own. It makes shapes in the white haze like the finger of God flicking stars as if they were marbles. I retrace my footsteps to reclaim all I’ve lost. The footsteps are as big as countries, yet smaller than the feet of tiny birds splashing in puddles. Like twigs, the hair in my nostrils snaps as the temperature continues to drop. Where once there was sadness, there’s romance, coursing through my veins like water down a storm drain. In a dream on the settee at three in the afternoon, the world and everything in it is inside out. Like a drunken kiss made out of love, and a letter of admission to the ghosts I never got the chance to lay to rest. The breath in my lungs escapes in the shape of a crucifix. As black as the bible. Heavier than a coitus sigh. From the shadow of a thrift store near the street where I was born, my younger self watches with envious eyes.

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