I lay in bed face down, but that didn’t help anything, so I rolled on to my side and hugged my knees to my chest, but that didn’t help either, so I rushed to the bathroom and knelt, let the bile escape my body like a cooperative parasite. Made my nose run and my eyes water. And I was there for a while, gagging and gagging, until my heart began to skip beats.

The terror of it all was almost funny. Truly. The pain was ludicrous, completely unreasonable, completely alien; I found it impossible to believe that this sort of feeling could even exist, that the boundaries of human suffering extended this far. As I collapsed back into bed, I realized that, if good and bad feelings lived together on a scale, I’d never experience the good equivalent of the badness I was feeling. Ecstasy lives somewhere in the clouds but misery tunnels, deep, deep, to the centre of the Earth and out the other side.

Cockroach flesh. Itchy insides, fingernail-peeling. Pins and needles but everywhere, inside, outside, upside down.

I took to self-inflicting; smaller bouts of sharp pain distracted me momentarily from the dull, all-encompassing one, so I pinched my arms, bit my tongue, punched my thighs, screamed into my pillow.

Dad was dead. Dad was dead. Dead was Dad and Dad was dead.

Perhaps the most selfish thought I’d ever had: maybe it would have been better if I’d never known Dad at all.

Eventually, ‘Dad is dead’ turned into ‘I will die’, which was my introduction to the fear. The fear of gone. The fear of nothing at all, of what happens to me, of I am the main character and the story will crumble if I’m not there to see it through. This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t ask to be born; I didn’t ask to be hurt; I didn’t ask to feel anything at all!

I screwed my thumbs into my eyes, watched as the black went pitch-black and the pitch-black went spotty, little neon stars convulsing and pulsing and dying. Pretended the stars were rushing past me, behind me; I was in a spaceship, maybe, or maybe just piloting through the cosmos in my human body, and I was heading back to where I’d come from, wherever I was a week ago, the world before.

More than anything, I was trapped. I wanted out, because everything was awful, but there was no way out; the way out was what terrified me.

So I didn’t move a muscle.

Monday. Mom’s snooty friends came over, stayed and stayed and stayed. When they weren’t dead quiet, they were shrieking.

I’d resigned myself to my fate.