Lonely. A bleak outlook at the best of times, but tonight, tonight it was a particularly frightening prospect. The terrors, the terrors that come to haunt and infest and take up unearthly residence in my mortal frame were to take up their parasitical sabbatical again this evening. I tried everything to steel myself against the onslaught of fear and doubt and malevolence and evil that would slowly devour me, awake or alive or asleep or otherwise. The more I tried to prepare myself, the weaker I became. The prospect of the living nightmares returning weakened my resolve like a disintegrating leprosy. The more I tried to buttress my resolution, the worse the sinking in the core of my gut became.

Falling. The feeling of falling, like when you nod off and wake up expecting to be splattered on a dreamy pavement, but awake and alive and internal and owning my presence. My presence, my little piece of impact on the world, taken and consumed by an infernal fetid essence, reducing me to a broken down offcut of humanity, taking up so little space so as not to make any impact anywhere. Falling, sinking, hollow, empty, dying.

I readily admit defeat. I want defeat. I want a resolution. I want to stop the wide awake murder of my soul. I imagine a putrid smell. I don't want to, I can't smell anything, but the thought of a noxious miasma assails my mind, controlling my mind, making me too scared to breathe in case it exists. Now my thoughts are taken over. Not entirely however, I have been left with enough sense of self to realise the horror of my situation. I am reduced to being an impotent tenant in my own soul.

No more falling. Now I am crawling, through a mire of despair. The bottom, not the end. There is no sensation of relief, just more punishment in a different direction. I imagine crawling on my hands and knees through a thick viscous black mire continually being entangled by great vines that are battering my body.

But I am just sitting there and it is all taking place within my skin, within my bones, within my soul, within my skull, within my self. Hell would be the most immediate comparison, but the thought of hell implies a shared experience. This is for me, inflicted upon me, designed for me by an undefinable assailant. This is my personal experience.

I am on the ground crawling into a corner. There is poison in the air hunting me. It is quickly taking up all the space in the room. It doesn't want to kill me, it wants to hurt me. I am forced into a corner, into a ball with my head tucked into my torso, smelling the hot damp sweat encasing my body, breathing my own warm vapours. I remain here in this position for I don't know how long, until I can't take it any more and my body starts to at first feel uncomfortable, and then cramp painfully in many places at once. I twist my head to the side for some relief, and to taste the scent of a different part of my body, and then realise the poison has gone.

How long has it been gone, I ask myself. How long have I been imprisoned in this corner? I give up thinking about it. My body wrests flexibility back from its stiffness, and I come to the realisation that I have been rendered to self imprisonment, humiliated and degraded, and that the ordeal is over again.