Author S. K. Nicholas

x and i: a novel

a journal for damned lovers vol 1-3

XandI

  • Dead Flowers

    The sun rises in your eyes, and I am a bag lady before my time. On a beach drenched in memory, eternity comes and goes in the to and fro of each wave, and although our bones will turn to dust and one day float through the stratosphere without so much as a whimper, in Read more

  • Soapy Water

    When it’s raining, and the streets fog behind my glasses, I pretend I’m back in the womb, or if not the womb, then eating mints in a pram in Lewsey Farm, with my nan pushing me along the pavement not realising that one day, the world would exist without either of us in it. If Read more

  • 3:15 am

    Rolling onto my side, I slip an arm beneath your body. You’re so far away, yet close enough for me to feel every heartbeat. In one tick of the bedside clock, your breath is upon my face, and then the next, the two of us are standing on a street we haven’t set foot on Read more

  • Favourite Scar

    My body, just like my mind, is covered with scars, like a blanket littered with cigarette burns, or the pockmarked face of a teenage kid, transitioning from childhood bliss to the limbo lands of adulthood. I keep picking at my scars, so they never, ever heal. My scars, you see, are my memories. My life Read more

  • By Your Side

    Secretly, the ghost of you is the ghost of me. We’re intrinsically linked, like the ocean to the shore or the shiny sun to the weeping moon, and you should know, that even after all this time, my thoughts are bound to you and you alone. They were born the moment I first set eyes Read more

  • No Ghost in These Machines

    The leaves in the park are the faces I’ve known but no longer know. They dance and float around as I pass through in silence, head down and dreaming of a secret someone who inspires within me a secret smile. It’s been a while, and yet, what is time really, but a bland invention ushered Read more

  • Sunless Afternoons

    As I hurtle through space on a tiny blue rock with no clue as to what’s going on, the only place that keeps me safe from harm is the memory of your cradling arms. Everything else is pointless, more or less. Life is big, and yet it’s also microscopically small. Atoms are pretty much nothing—like Read more

  • Feral Heart

    Documentaries on YouTube regarding folding time and space while scoffing a burger, drunk and in love with the memory of you falling into some bushes after a bender in town. As the memory sparks, locusts try their best to get in through a gap in the window. The world is collapsing. Darkness deepens on the Read more

  • Adore

    The streets are the same. They lead you in circles. The circles are the same, too, just like those belonging to crying eyes. Eyes that cry in silence, at the foot of a tree in a cemetery where they’ve buried so many of your own. You wipe the tears on the cuff of your jacket. Read more

  • Dead Stars Kissed

    In the early hours, I remember leaves hitting the windows of the bus as it passed from leafy town to leafy town, with time of no consequence to anyone. I remember the mittens on your hands as the fireworks overhead blossomed the same as your body as we showered together not long after we finished Read more