The sky is velvet. The sun mostly unseen. I’m a dinosaur, dead before my time as I roam around a town that burns in the haze of orange streetlights. I am an echo. Like the cries of a dolphin long since dead swallowed by the secretive seas and now little more than sunken bones in an ocean without a name. I am a vague spectre caught in the lens of a camera—a shadow in the corner of someone’s eye, wiped away like a slimy sleepy that clings to your cheek like a shameful tear. Scattered behind me are the remnants of a disorganised mind. Like breadcrumbs, or the pages of a manuscript with all the ideas in the world, but not a single word that resonates with another living thing. The garbled sheets are leaves, sticking to the feet of people who pass me by as if they’re not even real. Or is it that they’ve been the real ones all along, and I’m the imposter? A replicant without even knowing? Kneeling down, I touch the ground, but I’m falling before I know it.

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