As I butter my slice of toast, the layers of time smother me. With one, quick bite, I taste heaven. When I swallow, the knot in my stomach untangles and everything makes sense. But it never lasts. The only thing that persists is the strangeness. The strangeness of drinking coffee in a café where I was once half my age, dreaming of things I never knew would come my way. The change in my pocket rattles like a bird in a cage. No feathers, just bones. I think about fucking halfway down the stairwell from the Exorcist. In a nondescript hotel, I touch myself in the shower picturing the trees in my old garden and how they shone so green in those summer months in my retreats from university. No boundaries, merely the exuberance of youth. Little remorse, just the wish for a high that didn’t take a nosedive before it got good. The hotel sits on a street where the kid in me kicks leaves into the sky. The world spins so fast. Life changes in the time it takes to sip a beer and swallow a lungful of smoke eyeing those whose only gift is the poetry of their flesh. What it changes into remains hidden. The beer softens the edges, but the outlines are still unclear. The second I put my finger on what defines me, the shape of it shifts into something else. Like colours, emotions bleed into others, never the same as they were in the beginning.

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