Glitterland (Spires #1)

by Alexis Hall

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 most oblivious man in Brighton hustled after me, leaned in, and—of all things—kissed me on the cheek. It was so utterly unexpected that I didn’t have time to avoid it, and then he sauntered off like nothing had happened. Leaving my skin to burn with the memory of his lips, as though he had branded me with his smile.

All sense, all judgement, overthrown by an h-dropping, glottal-stopping glitter pirate,

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.

There was little I feared more than happiness, that faithless whore who waited always between madness and emptiness. My moods, when they were not sodden with medication, could turn upon a tarnished penny; happiness was merely something else to lose.

I wished I could sleep. I wished I could stop thinking. But my mind has always been its own enemy.

My hand clenched about his, my nails pressing pale, desperate smiles into his skin.

My fingers and lips became the enthralled cartographers of his flesh.

it’s difficult, sometimes, for me to understand that I have the power to hurt someone. You see, it requires me to accept that somebody might like me in the first place.”

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.

Darian, my glitter pirate, the brightest heart of my greyest years. I closed my eyes, as Icarus must once have done, and was glad to burn.

And I came apart in a handful of brightly splintering moments, for once untainted by knowledge of the shadows that gathered on the other side.

“It’s just it feels like such…such a gift, you know? Having this person who has seen you tired and ground down and dull, who has been there when you’ve come home moody and exhausted and unsexy, who’s had an early night with you instead of sex on the kitchen table, or thrown aside a plan to go somewhere or do something so you can spend a day in pyjamas, sometimes not even bothering to talk to each other.