My laptop was now my most intimate companion, a thin space containing so many places to slip to. One week, I looked at nothing but tornados, giant dark chimneys of air spinning around fields, followed by the camera, an eye that revealed its humanness every time it retreated, realizing it had gone too close. Every time, I willed it to keep going, to go straight through the swirling, smoke-­grey mass, through the cows and chairs lifted in the air, right into the centre, where everything is calm. Occasionally, one of the children would wander in sleepily; I shut the laptop fast, before they could even glimpse what was on the screen.

I watched tsunamis, bodies of water that were able to bring down buildings, to lift and carry cars, sweep away a city like the wipe of a cloth. The website suggested other videos I might like: landslides, helicopter crashes, explosions. I clicked from one catastrophe to the next, soothed by their repetition, by the way terror unfolded across the smooth shapes of my bedroom. The images stopped – for a few minutes at a time – the racing of my mind, its skimming over the surface of my life, across the surface of the planet itself, unable to slow down. I had not felt such speed since my early twenties, learning forgotten languages, feeling their contours rise and open as I pressed them. Before my eyes, ancient symbols became moist, pliable: they gave themselves to me, gladly. But now my own pace scared me: I was barely in control, it seemed, lifting endlessly through columns of thought with no clear way to land.

I was always ashamed the next morning, as though I had spent the night looking at bad porn instead of witness accounts, live footage, shaking images, covered in screams. I could see that there were legitimate cravings for violence, and repugnant ones; watching news footage, at the time, was acceptable. Watching it five or ten years later was not. Reading true-­crime books, listening to podcasts about mass murder: all fine. Watching a video of a man dragging his bleeding friend down the street, listening to the audio of a school gun attack, a plane going into a building, over and over again: these were signs of disturbance. And yet, I wasn’t alone. Ten million views, twenty million, three hundred million views, said the pale grey text below the clips, the number sometimes scrolling upwards even while I watched.

On Christmas Eve, we were due to have our annual drinks party for neighbours and friends, featuring fairy lights, mistletoe, mulled wine, no one left sober. All year, it was my single gesture towards sociability, towards making friends of our school acquaintances, people we knew from choirs and sports clubs and taking out the bins. To not have it would show that something was wrong, I reasoned, during one sleepless night. It would make people ask what was happening.