While I sleep, the lazy sperms in me shoot out the window and become stars. They twinkle and shine, dead yet alive. In my skull, somewhere between memory and make-believe, a seedy cinema shows artsy films about the permanence of yesterday while my younger self goofs around with a girl who should know better. The patterns on the beer-soaked carpet are the same as when I first planted my awkward footsteps all those years ago. It’s not a cinema anymore but a pub. The pub glistens. The night passes beyond closed eyes. The world goes round. Somewhere inside, I’m drawn to the piss-stained wallpaper in the gents’ toilets. Time has turned it into a journal written by a novice drunk. The kind blinded by love and a wish to drown his insecurities with drink. Those about me are wild animals spooked by their own shadows. The rest are ghosts stuck between a desire to live and a need to be free in realities that can never be. Tossing and turning, I’m awake yet paralyzed. Gasping. Drooling. I’m aware that the love that didn’t succeed was a warm-up act. Those first scars, once so raw, now little more than abstract artefacts. Out the front door, I walk the streets where I changed from a boy into a man. Every action, every thought, leaving a trace of itself behind. Like signatures, or the carved initials in the bark of a tree left by those no longer here.

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