As I sniff the bricks and mortar, a lorry rumbles past. No licence plates and a shadow for a driver. The dust it kicks up swallows me like a fog, shrinking my bones and boiling my envious blood so it resembles a fine sand. Closing my eyes, I’m reminded of the fog of my lover’s drunken womb at three in the morning as beads of sweat cling to her upper lip. The fog of the past is at the window, wishing to cradle my soul like a ring of dead nebulas, strangely alive before my infant eyes. It could be today, but when I’m in one of my moods, there’s no telling where I am. The past is where I am. That’s why they call me the memory man. I worship mammary glands and the smell of sweaters belonging to those who have tickled me the way I tickle myself in the shade of the midnight sun. With my head in my hands as the threat of the slab threatens my tiny heart, I hear the sounds of yesterday as clearly as I hear my laboured breaths. On videotape, flashes of flesh distort my moral compass. On my phone, a blurred photo taken in an underpass of a straggling figure of the man I used to be. Drunk. Malnourished. Fingers nicotine-stained to hell. My wrists are shaky. So are my legs. I’m like Mohammed Ali, or Sharky and George, the crime busters of the sea. The older I get, the less this makes sense, for what was once my everything is now a faded sketch pressed between the pages of a book I have no interest in ever reading 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