Sirius

Pack your bags. Right now. Only a rucksack, a backpack, or whatever else you call it.

You don’t know where you’re going, but you can’t stay here – wherever that is for you.

Are you ready? You don’t have long, so hurry up.

What do you have?

Personally, I packed:

• Laptop and charger, phone and charger
• Pyjama trousers, two shirts, jumper
• Four books.
• Sketchbook
• And a continuation of a letter I’ve begun months ago.

Your keys are in your jacket and your friend’s come to pick you up and you get the fuck out of there, not looking back.

‘Hullo, James,’ you say with a forced smiled. Knowing full well that as much as you don’t like it, you have become Sirius Black and you need a place to stay, far from your house. ‘I don’t mean to sound rude,’ your face is wet, your nose disgusting, ‘but can we get out of here, please?’

 

 

 

Border Patrol

Where’s the line?

Where’s the border between our two countries that I cannot, absolutely under no circumstances, cross without needing the proper papers?

I’ve never been good at geography, so you’ll have to tell me. Distance to me is in the extremes – close or far. Depth perception isn’t my strong suit. I can’t tell you how many yards something is away from me, that’s when I point and shrug.

‘It’s over there, I can tell ye that.’

What’s the point when it’s painfully obvious to me, and not just everyone else, that I’m deluding myself about you. Did you know that I felt guilty for thinking about going on a date with someone I thought I might actually like because it somehow, somewhere, felt like I was cheating on you.

I’m ridiculous, I know.

But living in this cross territory of not knowing where I am confuses me. I need a compass and the only way I’m going to get that is with you showing me the map and telling me the directions.

‘This is where we stand.’

Either we’re using this map together, or I need to buy my own.

This is About You

This is About You (or)

If I Were Braver (Part Five)

I don’t even know if you’ll read this – I hope you do, if that means anything.

I wish I could see you, I wish I could touch you.

I wish you weren’t an arse.

I wish you didn’t like other girls. Just the thought of you liking someone else frightens me in a way that paralyses my lungs.

I wish you could come to terms with your sorrow and fears instead of turning angry and pushing people away.

I wish you never pushed me away.

I wish I weren’t so pathetic.

I wish I knew why I felt this way. My friends and psychiatrist think they know why, but I’m afraid to use the words they use. Speaking makes it true, doesn’t it? It’s part of the Magic. Right? Right.

What right do I have though? I told you of my last date with this arsehole. I kissed this ultimate loser when I’m still mentally devoted to you. I thought I was being smart, I thought I was ‘keeping my options open’, but in reality, I was only trying to distract myself from you. Once more, I was trying to get over you.

I don’t like this, I don’t like these thoughts at all and I feel as if it is mostly my fault.

Oh, if only you were to tell me, give me some sign.

I’m going positively mad and I hate that – I shouldn’t allow a person to make me feel this way! I should be above that, I should use my head instead of my heart.

I hate you.

I like you.

I supremely like you.

And listen here, she better be the best goddamn girl in the world. She better make your heart swell and fill your mind with thoughts. She better be as important to you as you are to me.

Untitled III

Wasted words wet tongue, crash against the inner folds of lips;

the dark crevices succumbing to the twisted sweet taste of neglect and past mistakes

tumbling in my mind like a dancer falling from Heavenly Grace.

Did it hurt on your fall from the sky, asked with a smile.
 

The tip of a blade scratching into the flesh,

staining, bleeding, black.

Flying fallen into your post bin of rubbish.

A Moment of Repose

 

INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT.

And before I could comprehend what was happening, I was pissing the bed. I was pissing myself. One moment I was in my head, enjoying a sensational necking session with a girl who was not yet my girlfriend but who I wanted to make my girlfriend when my dream self felt the need to – well, piss. I ditched the bird-who-wasn’t-my-bird-but-who-I-wanted-to-be-mine and magically teleported to my toilet.

Jump cut, wham bam. There I was, sans bird, but enjoying the feeling of being in my own proper bog nonetheless.

Well, it wasn’t the toilet in my flat, but I knew that it was mine.

Whatever, it was a dream. You know the feeling in dreams where something isn’t yours in real life, but in the dream life you know—

I am confident that you are smart enough to catch my drift. And my drift is this: I was in my own fucking toilet.

Jump cut once more. It took an unacceptable amount of time for me to realise I was not releasing myself in the once controversial white Marcel Duchamp readymade, but on my sheets. Against my legs.

Holy fuck, I am a twenty-three-year-old man pissing his own goddamn bed.

And because I am a twenty-three-year-old man who is secure enough in his sexuality, I am not afraid to tell you that for a moment

–a moment that by all polite society would agree, overstayed its welcome—

it felt nice. Comfortable, safe, welcome, even as the warm liquid waste was being drained from my urinary tract and spread itself against my thighs and my grey sheets. I would have gladly continued to piss myself and mattress until I woke myself up enough to realise that I was actually fucking pissing myself.

By the time I went downstairs to my toilet (my actual, real-life toilet, not the dreamt up version), there wasn’t much left to squeeze out. And by that time, in my misguided, unwanted night-time adventure, the stench of urine produced from consuming too many late night diuretics in the form of coffee was disturbing. I’d forgotten how badly piss could smell and how quickly it could fill up your nostrils. The extreme cold of air hitting my not-yet-soaking-but-more-than-just-damp sleeping pants and bare legs prompted me to pull up my soiled trousers as soon as I was sure I had nothing else to add to the light amber offerings in my porcelain collection plate.

And would you like to know the most disgusting bit?

–If everything else hasn’t completely turned you off yet.–

I didn’t even change out of my wet trousers.

Why would I? It was dark, and the darkened world that I could see was marred from the absence of my prescribed lenses over my eyes. I didn’t even have enough decency to grab a towel and try to clean myself. I pulled my trousers back to my waist, possibly pressed down the flusher, and climbed back to my bed. I spread out an old towel that only happened to be lying on the floor next to the cot because I had been too lazy to clean anything for the past fortnight. And after spreading this dirty green towel down in a spot that wasn’t the spot I had been lying in only minutes ago, I took off my trousers on account of my legs, thighs, knees, and toes, knees and toes beginning to fucking freeze. I threw the offending trousers somewhere behind me—mind you, I couldn’t see for shit—I laid back down on my stomach, only moving to cover my bare ass with my dry sheets. I pressed my nose into my pillow, trying to remember the exact image of the bird I was feeling up, but trying to remember her exact features only made the vision of her vanish even more quickly from my mind.

Eyes closed, I wondered if she crossed the dream/reality spectrum and thus knew about me pissing my own self and bed.

Not that I have any personal experiences, but I know that the occupants of the fair sex wouldn’t want to lay a lad who pissed his sheets.

Bare-assed, lying on a towel that I had forgotten about, blocking the smell of my own liquid waste by stuffing my nose in a pillow, I thought to myself of how this was the first ever occasion that I preferred dreaming of feeling up a bird instead of actually feeling up a lass in real life.

Not that I had any personal experience, but I sort of figured a girl in real life wouldn’t have wanted to have been woken up by the feeling of another’s warm piss creeping over her legs.

—

An except from a chapter to a literature piece I’m developing. This is the first scene I wrote and might be my favourite scene from the male character.