I did this to myself, but they helped willingly. Wished myself away and with a push and smile they…

But all that has passed now and I am here. Living dead in a dead man’s house. Surrounded by relics of an unlived life, photos of people I never knew, books I may never read. Scrolled iron security gates locked at night. CCTV and tarot cards.

For a while I slept with a knife in my bed, until I cut my hand when I woke from a nightmare and grabbed the blade. Perhaps slicing skin stopped me remembering the nightmare, but I know it wasn’t the one where the shadow perches on my windowsill, claw raised to a dead night sky.

Opioids. Avoid anything that pretends to be something it’s not. This is doubly true with drugs. Opioids pretend to be opium, via morphine, heroin, and other controlled or restricted but naturally derived substances. Ironically, I write this with a synthetic nicotine pouch tucked into the line of my gum.

Opioids. I always avoided prescription drugs, even recreationally. Recreational drugs create a temporary bubble. It’s a little sad when you have to leave, but comedowns are easier to ride out than hangovers, besides which there are always more weekends. Prescription drugs tend to create a bubble that’s so horrible to leave, you have to keep it inflated, stay inside, away from the horrors of pain, the morbidity of living.

I did not choose to become addicted to opioids. I just ate the food she cooked and didn’t question the ingredients. Those were the ‘on’ weeks, unknowingly wrapped in cotton wool, too chill to care about the snide remarks or really notice there was no one in my life but her. Then came the ‘off’ weeks and I’d plummet into the void. Blue-tinted world.

Eventually I realised, hatched a plan, escaped. Slept and slept for three months. Didn’t leave the house I thought would become my mausoleum. Indignation saved me. I used to be suicidal and almost was again, until the day I got angry at the thought of someone else killing me. “That’s my job”, I told myself.

I’ve always been a hard worker and hate the idea of someone having to do my job because I’ve been slacking off. I also hate the idea of a dying a shitty death with a pitiful look of regret in my eyes. To avoid that, I had to rebuild myself so I could die properly. I had to become something else. Even now I am still becoming.

I become by writing. I become by not drinking or smoking. I become by doing push-ups whenever I’m agitated. I become by mixing myself into paint and painting sigils. I become by reminding myself I have enemies. I see them triumphant and rejoicing, after my demise, at having driven me away.

“I have my books and my poetry to protect me”, Paul Simon wrote. I have mine too. Like he, I am safe in their armour.

Above all this I have my novel, this seething, surreal, absurd, sarcastic, spiteful, joyous, hedonistic, whimsical, parochial, baffling story of how I came to be. Don’t try to find it. Given the proper circumstances, at the proper time, it will find you.