Bibliography

There exists a town between fields of war and murder on one side and a vast expanse on the other; a great and featureless plain. The town is dilapidated, driven through by an endless convoy of military vehicles. Dogs skulk the town's edges; worse monsters live out in the fields. The town has its inhabitants. Those few who persist for some short time amidst the eternal conveyance. There is the drunk, with the emptiness in his soul. The child who sees prophecies behind its eyes of the end of humanity. The leaver, departing this life, and the left, who remains. And there is the boy who is surrendered to his addiction. Who when he sleeps, dreams of nothing.

'And then a reverie, a stirring, heartfelt moment which arises unsought from memory with the cruelty of dreams – that you fool your own feelings into believing they are real – and you laugh, you cry, you’re hysterical either way; your heart is full of love even as it is rent, mutilated by grief; your smile at the memory is as powerful as your mourning of its passing, and the voices say grief is a process, loss comes in stages, bipolar can be learned to be lived with, and I say melt down my body, dismember it, crack the involucre and pour me out, amalgamate my essence into the greater body of loss where my grief can become anonymised, plural, my wail can join the everlasting chorus – let me die.'