You are somehow in the bathroom. You stand there bewildered by a moment. Watching the toilet flush, the water cascade and collapse upon itself, transfixed. It empties then fills with a surprising roar. You are here, but not. You can’t remember how you got there, or what just happened. You wash and dry your hands. You are now automatic.

Empty has filled you. Again.

You stand in the kitchen. Look around, then down, seeing yourself as a stranger in familiar circumstances. All is internal. You wait. Why are you here and here you are lock horns and battle for sense. You wait, you stand. Shoulders hunched, head lowered, thoughts lower still.

What is simple is now complex.

All actions are tiring. Those who care ask questions, but the weight of the answers are too heavy to lift. You cannot show these things. What you carry now is as large as it is invisible. You try to respond, but you cannot. You are silenced, winded again. Breathing is all you can hope for, manage.

Everything rubs the eye, pierces the ear.

The air has become solid. You move slowly through time. Your face is slackened, hands clumsy, grace inert. You want everyone to go, for everything to fade to gone. You repel care while you couldn’t care less. It doesn’t matter if you hurt someone tonight because pain is as distant as pleasure. Emotion is a construct now, a falsehood.

You are anti-everything, pro-nothing.

You assault the self. What triggered this latest bout is forgotten. Memories cannot be stirred, steps cannot be retraced, paths are without signs. You’d never come here again if you knew how you got here in the first place. You’re too tired to hate now. Even yourself. That would require feeling.

You are a shell, a vacuum wrapped in clothes.

Tonight you hear the jackals forage outside. They yelp and bark in the distance under a deadened sky. They gossip about your sensitivity to moments, and laugh at how the slightest, everyday event can bring you to the ground so easily. You sit outside yourself and concur. There’s no embarrassment here tonight. All theories are correct when everything seems wrong. You’d laugh at yourself if laughter were possible.

You sit. You wait. Night drags the dread of daylight towards you.

You are null, lost in a void.

There is a recoil, an invisible, inaudible snap, then – an unconscious thunderclap. All is quiet apart from hate.

One moment you were a living, breathing thing – now this is replaced by a personal gravity, a force pulling all and everything down, then further still, until it sinks through a level you thought was solid. It floats, hovers, and lands soft and heavy – a feather, leaden. The dust caught hanging in the air by the sunlight blinds you, rain on the window shatters your vision – the day breaks upon the glass and forecasts a sweet and sickly darkness. The horror of existence is made apparent in this latest kaleidoscope, magnified and magnificent – a terrible, awful beauty. It turns. It twists. Everything spins.

What was inside is now out, and even the upsides are down.

It has risen, dark and ravenous, from within. It is seemingly awakened by the simplest of thoughts, by the most innocent of dreams, by passing statements from those who care. Aroused by the idea of itself, it slouches towards me, hunched, powerful and ready – eager to repel hope, yearning to feed upon itself, knowing that its hunger will not be satisfied until it is full and I am empty. How it loves to pounce, full of surprise and illogical wit, pulling and stretching to breaking point all I have gathered within myself since it’s last unwelcome visit. A pop-in from internal anger, a visitation from nothing, a null. It leaves only whispers in a vacuum.

It told me I had failed, and that to try would only be to fail again.

All who I love, those near and far, I yearn to push away. To be alone is to be blessed. I hold my tongue amongst others – I would be seen to be speaking, but the words, I think, would not be mine. They would be the truth of sorrow,  spoken through pain.

I wait, and hope it passes.