I feel like shit, I realized. I feel so bad. I feel like shit warmed up. What’s going on, I wonder. What’s it all about. I was trying to work it out. I was trying to make sense of it all. Why do I feel so bad. It felt as if I had just been thawed out after a long, long sleep, a long, long period of hibernation. Such a long period of hibernation. It could have been numberless ages for all I knew. An indeterminable length of time. impossible to know what came before it, if indeed anything did. And now I was thawing out, slowly becoming aware of that fact that I exist. The painful fact that I exist, I should add. That I’m here.

What’s it all about, my brain wonders. What’s going on. Do I really want to know. To say that I feel ‘rough’ scarcely does justice to my situation – rough would be a picnic compared to this. To how I feel. How do I feel?  Like shit on a swing-swong. Like shit on a pogo-stick. My mind is only very slowly becoming aware of all the possibilities of feeling bad that there are here. All the various shades of suffering. A world of possibilities has opened up for me and it is not good…

I feel like laughing but at the same time I don’t. What are you laughing about says a voice coming out of the dim recesses of my mind. Are you mad in the head or what. Only of course there never was a voice issuing deep from the recesses of my mind, that was just something I made up. It’s part of the story that I’m telling myself. Numberless ages of numbness slowly giving way like a glacier melting dropping me here, incongruously leaving me sitting here on this couch. What am I to make of it? Make of it what you will says the voice in my head. Who cares what you make of it anyway. Like that has anything to do with it! The voice is full of scorn, only there isn’t a voice. I made it up. I have invented it as a kind of literary device. Something to help me make sense of my situation. Something to help me accentuate my suffering. Something to help me put a sharp edge on it.

Numbness imperceptibly giving way to awareness of numbness. Numbness giving way to an aching growing awareness of pain. Who the hell could anyone sell waking up I find myself wondering. Anything else, but not waking up…