I want you to close your eyes. No, really. I want you to close your eyes. Let all the dopamine and serotonin drain away and dissolve.

Close your eyes. See if you can hear your heartbeat, see if you can feel your skin prickling with scuttling scorpions and see if you can sense neuroreceptors sparkling. Rusty, grinding mechanisms. See if you can feel the breath entering and leaving your body. See if you can feel your cunt tingle. Check that you are still alive. Close your eyes, and try and block out all of the light, because that is just exactly what it feels like.

I want you to envisage yourself, lying on warm sand, gazing up at the endlessly immense black arc of the world, shimmering like an inky pool, its depths immeasurable, its surface perfect and undisturbed. You are but one point of light, in an infinite landscape of stars: insignificant, frantic, consumed with your own worth, desolate, meaningless, ground up, spat out, effortlessly claimed by this infectious helplessness, dissolving all of the goodness and joy, leeching away everything that makes you,
you.

I want you to close your eyes and focus on all of those times that you have been betrayed, raped of spirit, or anguished, or overcome with grief, and I want you to bundle it all up and make them into a little pillow on which to rest your stricken and bloodied head. I want you to look up at all of those pretty little stars, and try to count them up, because I can’t tell if they are real. I want you to help me figure out this demented, carnivalesque FUCKED up merry-go-round, this senseless rabid masterplan, full of ruthless, decaying idols and shrines, orchestrated by a maniacal, vengeful god that strips you of faith and desire and leaves you bleeding.

Agonise over it, really fucking try, pull your arms out their sockets to see if you can fly, sell your liver to a torture museum, rip off your genitals and put them in a polystyrene display case wrapped in plastic rose petals: try and make sense of it all, see if it all still makes sense when you are losing grip, see if it all still fits inside your head, see if you can grasp even a minuscule, infinitesimal granule of hope.

I want you to listen to yourself breathing, and realise that you are miraculous, you are a triumph. I have to constantly convince myself that all of this is worth it. I have to indisputably, indelibly prove to myself that my next breath is worthwhile. I will never understand all of you happy polystyrene people, shrieking and splashing at each other in unbridled ecstasy.

Listen to those gentle waves lapping at the shore, hear the cry of the distant seabird, screeching, pleading for your happiness, begging for you to do it. Just keep walking out into the ocean, disappear into the horizon. I can no longer see the sky and the stars have been extinguished. I know that the door is locked and she can’t get in. I know that the pills are starting to work and the black plastic bag over my head will block out all of the light.

Now, I realise that I don’t matter, I realise that I am worthless, I know that every single word I have ever uttered is a lie. There is no other fate left for me in the orbit of this planet of self-loathing drenched in this rank twilight, choking in a saturated polythene sleeping bag, covered in festering sores invisible to the naked eye, because that is just exactly what it feels like.

Eternally gripped with despair, corrosive and irreparable. I know that no one would even realise that I am gone, there may be tears for a time, but nothing can touch you when you are stuck in that pit, through the trapdoor, embracing blankness, feigning a smile, just make that fucking little voice stop, please, please, just to be at peace.

I know that it fucking hurts. I have been there. Teetering on the brink, waiting for the cool kiss of water to slide into my lungs: sweetest nectar of asphyxiation.

She pleads with me, please, don’t go, but I am already gone. She said she needs me, that he needs me, to be there for him, to watch him grow up, but she just doesn’t understand this agony. I can’t come back now, it is far too late.

I lie there and look up at the glitter of the heavens, but I still can’t see the stars, I only see holes. I float off, into nothing, soon to be forgotten, leaving only this mania, this fervour, this fire scratched in statuesque wonder, etched into paper, praying to see the son, rising into the stratosphere, dismembering the pain, as this piteous, drunken dragon claws against ribcage.

I cannot let you inside, and all of the pills and the cuddles cannot kill it. The happy polystyrene people do not appear to live with eternity jammed inside them, and they do not seem to realise that the sky is on fire. They do not suffer syrupy spinal columns all filled up with bile and rancour, with this insanity surging overhead.

I know that she tries to understand, and she tries to tell me that everything is going to be alright, but all I can see is the end, and the numbness will not stop.

She pleads with me, please, don’t go, but I am already gone, from the unendurable torture, of simply being alive.

Hush now, child.
No more pain.
The worst is at an end.
Float off, into eternity.
Finally, forever, at peace.
Close your eyes,
Take a breath.
Check if you are still alive.

Own the agony.
You are the captain now.
Persist.
Persevere.
Do not capitulate.
Do not submit.

Conquer.
Be victorious.
Be stupendous.
Be champions.
Don’t give up,
Not yet.
Live,
Please,

Live.