Nearly two years of dates. Still no question. Her mother and father want to set a proper date. Still no question. Her friends keep asking, when, Natasha? When? But she still hasn’t been asked The Question. It’s enjoyable to be the one with all th...
Pain is usually all on the surface, but this terror is internal; not just a hurt, but a new language of feeling.
So deep is the conflict, I believe I cannot breathe for all the doubt, guilt and sorrow my sister is pushing into me as her hand presses harder upon my sore breastplate and her fingers nervously twist the rusted clasp I remember so well. She is liste...
The city is sore with movement, but still it oscillates. Busy people churn through grey-toned streets, their briefcases held close, rustling against trouser legs. The collective machine is tired, but each worker drives on. Gleaming taxis mirror stile...
At first, I didn’t understand. Understanding came very slowly.
Somewhere, beyond blackness, some tyrant host swaps breathing for airlessness to test me. I had no concept of myself, no link to the things I knew. It is hard to explain the lack of anything concrete to people who live in a world of objects, but ther...
Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.
Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.
I need a new trick if I am to walk without legs, see without eyes or speak without words.
It’s unpleasant magic, the kind that darkens the senses, the kind no one wants to experience, but once in a lifetime might not be able to avoid.
Something Simon composed years ago is playing on someone else’s personal headphones; it’s a man sat opposite him in the waiting room. He believes the man is destroying his piece by reading a car magazine at the same time, like both forms of atten...
He remembers how someone – he forgets who – once said in a sarcastic tone, “Isn’t she just Little Miss Sweetness and Light?” – and it was a statement that put him off proposing. It made him seriously reassess his options. He didn’t want...
No trees, sky or ground. No other buildings or fields. No winding path, no brambles, no outhouse or pond or flowers, no sunshine or children playing. Just blackness.
Even though I knew, deep down, what she was trying to do, I couldn’t hate her. Even when she hurt me, I forgave her.
Right now, in this dusty anti-paradise, I have absolutely no hand in the future at all.
I have always hated lies; my own and everyone else’s.
I used to love lulling, running water – a sound so infrequent in cityscapes. Its loss always made me feel lonely when I lived amongst concrete.
Truth starts with a sense.
