Glitterland

What's your name?" "A.A.Winters." "What, that's your name?" "Yes," I said impatiently, "that's my name." "That's what people call you?" "Like in bed, or whatever? They call you A.A.Winters?" I met his eyes. "No, in bed they call me God." He laughed again, the same uninhibited cackle. "Like it

So, lemme get this right. We're gonna make a go of it. You and me? Togevver? Even though I'm orange and you're mental?

In the past, I walk between green lawns, surrounded by golden stone. In the past, I am brilliant and I am happy and my every tomorrow is madness. In the past, words shimmer around me on silver threads and I pluck them like summer peaches. In the past, the universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. I am the axis of the world. In the past, I am soaring, and falling, and breaking, and lost.

I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am. Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be.

I would have told a thousand lies to have him, and a thousand more to keep him

He catches my face between his hands, his painted fingernails twinkling like stars, and when he kisses me it feels a bit like fear and tastes a bit like tears, but it’s as bright and sweet as sherbet, and I decide to call it joy.

When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.

Did happiness always used to be this complicated?" Amy asked after a bit. I shrugged, " I have no idea. Happiness and I are barely on speaking terms these days.

Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn't have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That should have been funny, right?

And I need you to know that if you send me away, I'll go, and I'll be fine. I'll be sad, but I'll be fine. I'll live and I'll write and I'll miss you and think about you, and, truthfully, I'll probably wank over you, and I'll be depressed sometimes and mad sometimes, but you won't have to worry because I'll be fine. I never used to believe it, but I know it now.

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.

I’m not here because I’m broken. I’m here because I’m whole. Difficult, potentially undeserving, but whole. And I don’t need you, I just want you. I want you”—my voice had gone embarrassingly husky—“so fucking much. And—” Another breath, another breath. “—maybe I love you. Or could love you. Or might love you. Or may come to love you.” There was a dizzy rushing in my brain, as though I was about to faint or have a nosebleed. “Or whatever.

A homosexual is for life, not just for Christmas.

So what else you into, then? I mean except reading and writing, talking like the Queen, and dressing like my granddad?

Whatever the internal mechanism that moderated the human capacity for joy, mine had long been broken beyond repair. And I knew this was a poor substitute, a base shadow cast on the cave wall, a reflection in a tarnished mirror of ordinary things like happiness, love, and hope. But there were moments, fleeting moments, lost in the responses of my body to his, when it was almost enough. And, God, I wanted, I wanted. These crumbs of bliss.

He kept making me feel things in ruined places.

But I would fight for Darian. Sacrifice be damned, selfish or not, hopeless or not, I would fight for Darian. I had not expectations of success, but I would try anyway, with all my meagre strength. For Darian and for me, for my right to try, and his right to have me, and because I wanted him.

He crashed over me like a wave and I was drowning. He shone so brightly and I was burning. Touched, by his hands and his body and his unintended mercies, I needed my distance back. Difficult, though, when my skin sang at his closeness and I blazed with wanting. I wanted to put my lips against his neck. I wanted to lick the sweat from where it would gather like glitter in the secret hollows of his flesh. I wanted him naked in my arms, like I'd had him in Brighton, but with not even darkness between us this time. I wanted to give him pleasure. Lavish him in it. Bedeck him with it, like pirate gold. Weave him a crown of my lost dreams. I wanted to kneel at his feet and suck his cock. I wanted him on his back, so I could look into his eyes while I fucked him.

I gotta say, babes," he said in a nasal Essex whine, "you're giving me sutcha bedroom look." I stared down into his face, so close to mine. Babes?

Depression simply is. It has no beginning and no end, no boundaries and no world outside itself. It is the first, the last, the only, the alpha and the omega. Memories of better times die upon its desolate shores. Voices drown in its seas. The mind becomes its own prisoner.

The cottage pie was about as wholesome and straightforward as you could get. It was food for winter evenings and happy days. And the salad was rich, complicated, a little bit sweet, and seemed to be trying way too hard to be impressive. We'd both served each other a metaphor.

I was playing games with myself, putting up a show of resistance, as if I could take it or leave it. But the truth was, whatever the price, I would gladly pay it just to feel...better. Connected. Human. Alive. Anything at all.

The truth was, somewhere down the line, between the hospitalisations and the drugs, I’d somehow lost the cornerstone of humanity: the ability to pretend, to counterfeit the basics of social interaction, to smile when you didn’t feel like smiling, to seem like you cared about other people when you lacked the capacity to care about yourself. So that left me, graceless and wearied, pretending to pretend.

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.

Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this.

Why, in all the vastness of the world, did a sparkly idiot from Essex make me feel alive?

How can you miss something you've never really had?

Shut up. For the love of Jesus fucking Christ on a moose, shut up. I'm trying to get off here." He fell on top of me, howling with laughter. And, somehow, in that ridiculous tangle, his hand moving awkwardly against my cock as he snuffled hysterically against my ear, and me yelling at him, my body shaking with frustration, amusement, pleasure, bewilderment, so much bewilderment, I did, in fact, get off.

My mouth fell open. “Did you really just compare me to Olivia Newton-John?” “I just meant like going from, y’know, prim to all sexed up.” “I feel . . . weird.” “You look amazin. Amazin.” He pulled me against him, hands snaking under the glamour cardigan to make the acquaintance of my arse. Chloe gave a warning screech. “Don’t smudge ’im!” He grinned, tilting his head because, in my heels, I was just a little bit taller than he was. “You’re giving me chills, babes.” “Is that so? Are they multiplying?” “Hunjed pahcent.” “You’d better shape up, then.” “You’re like totally the one that I want

How can you like him? Even putting aside the fact you've spent the last five years telling me you're incapable of liking anyone, he makes Winnie-Pooh look like Kasparov." "Well, I wasn't intending to play chess with him.