Dark. Darker than any coal hole I’ve ever seen, so little light from the clouds above. And cold with it, colder than any winter day when your breath makes thick clouds and the puddles have all iced over and it hurts to touch metal and you’re huddling and shivering though you’ve put so many layers on and you think you’ll never ever get warm again. Colder than that. And hopeless, without any hope at all. And the feeling of being dead. Of being lost from everyone. Buried alive deep down and no one to know it. And the feeling of uselessness, of being broken and alone. In the cold darkness. That’s how it felt.

I’ve been put out, I thought.

I’ve been snuffed out.

I’m not alight any longer.

It was like being lost, dropped out, thrown out, spat out, shovelled under, dropped down a great hole. Small. Very small. Knowing then in the black coldness how small I am, that I’d never be anything big. Crumb. Splinter. Lost thing. Little lost thing. That’s how it was. Something like that. Only that doesn’t quite do it either. Not yet. It’s like you’re dead, being out alone in the heaps, absolutely dead, extinct, done in, never remembered by anyone ever, never existed even, not ever, not known anywhere at all. Like that. Except you’re alive, except you’re breathing, except you’re there in this dead place, alive with all the thick deadness about you, on top of you, all around, moving in. That’s where I was. Out in the deep of it. There I trod, panting and miserable in the thick leather suit with my hulking metal helmet covering my noggin and all of it so big for me that I had to shuffle up inside of the suit to see out of the helmet window. Me and all those dead things. Hundreds and hundreds of different sized things, all smacked up together. Load of rubbish, wasn’t it.

I’m sorry, I thought, I’m so very sorry. For all the broken things. Ugly objects, how did you get like this, who did this to you? I’m sorry no one cares for you. I am sorry. But I can’t care for all of you, there’s not enough of me. I can’t. I don’t. You’d snuff me out, soon as anything. You’d have me in an instant.