I existed as a kind of made-up thing within the tortured confines of my own cruel head, a kind of grotesquely half-imagined homunculus. I lived a life of a crude and unpleasant simulation therefore, but I thought nothing of it. I thought nothing of it because I knew no better. I knew no other existence and so had no intimation of just how vile and squalid in existence this was! Strange as it may sound, I was content and not at all troubled by anything. I got by, doing the sort of things that I did in order to get by, absurd though I now know those things to have been. The things I used to do to pass the time back then now seem vague and nonsensical to me and I know that they must have been so, for it was all pure fantasy anyway. It was all pure fantasy from beginning to end, which was only to be expected since my existence (my squalid pseudo-existence, as I should probably call it) was only made-up stuff happening inside my own head. I imagined myself to have this life – this life of a badly imagined homunculus and then – on this basis – I exercised whatever poor semblance of freedom I had allotted to myself to eek out some kind of existence for myself, an existence within which I did certain sorts of imaginary things, and then felt either vague satisfaction or an equally vague dissatisfaction according to the imaginary outcome of these imaginary actions that I had seen fit to undertake. And to cap it all, I myself was some kind or species of a hallucination, stumbling along through its own bizarre fantasy world, blindly grasping out for the things that did not exist and never could. What kind of outcomes are real to a creature that itself isn’t real? What kind of outcomes would be meaningful to a creature that has itself only an imaginary existence? I can’t even begin to answer these questions. I don’t know what I was thinking back then; I don’t know how I understood myself or my world to be. A thrill of pure horror passes through me as I think of these things – people sometimes say light-heartedly of themselves “Oh, I don’t know what I was thinking when I did that!” Similarly, I don’t know what I was thinking either (only I’m not so light-hearted about it). I don’t know how that life which I had back then was meaningful to me. Do you know that way in which one human being – out of pure incalculable malice – can create a world for another person to exist within, a world that is purely malevolent in nature, which they – the victim – get helplessly sucked into it, not realising the nature of the cruel trick that has been played upon them? That kind of thing happens all the time, by the way – just in case you didn’t know. It’s just that no one ever talks about it. But anyway that’s what I did to myself – I tricked myself into living up in a made-up universe – a vile, crude, unwholesome mean-spirited type of a made-up universe. I created an avatar of myself to abuse. I was my own gimp. Well, that could happen to anyone, I hear you reply flippantly. That’s life. These things happen. But I know the real reason you say this you see. I’ve grown wise at this stage. I know that the only reason you say this is because you don’t really want to hear any more on the subject. I know that the truth is that you simply don’t want to know…