It was so normal that I could no longer hear the static in my mind, the end of a vinyl record stuck in a groove, skipping back to the start of the large swirl stamped into the poly carbonate. Just like this thing was stamped into my brain by an elephant wearing jack boots while I was sleeping – of course I was unaware. He’d got in with a marine grade spade and started making little furrows along my neurons, started laying the charges and trip wires to trigger an explosion, an event that was never foreseen. 

As patient as a grandfather clock the fuse had been ticking back and forth, back and forth, the cogs whirring their way through time until the alarm was set to go. The alarm that was like a symphony of a thousand angle grinders all tearing at the same bit of metal in unison. My conscious actions all being ground down to a single repetitive tic. Totally pre-occupied and focused on one thing. I see nothing else – I’m in a tunnel that’s leaked water from the river, it is dank and gloomy and 1950’s tiles are starting to peel off the wall. Car exhaust fumes are caught in a vacuum and threaten to suffocate, light, air.

Please! Get me out of this rut, this groove. Like a camel to water in a desert Oasis I return. I try to turn away but it’s like a magnetic force and the attraction is too strong. My mind just wishes to keep on keeping on – doing what it wants to be doing but the demon ingrained is too strong. I’ll need a couch in a nice quiet office to sort this one and someone to talk me through all this to get free, to make my own destiny again, to find a place of safety before it kills me…