We were living in the safe place that we had made. First we created the safe place, and then we lived in it. We liked living in it, we liked living in it because it was safe. We liked it because safe is good, because we liked being safe. But then we forgot that there was any world that wasn’t safe and so we become smug and conceited. We lost our memories. This is because of the Amnesia Effect. The Amnesiac Effect made us smug and conceited. The Amnesia Effect always does that – you can rely on it! It’s like a law of physics, it’s like F = ma or v = d / t.  Reality itself grew angry with us then and it decided to evict us from our hidey-hole. Reality decided to cast us out into the real world where we would have to learn to fend for ourselves as best we could. It would not be any fun – we would have to learn very fast if we were to have any chance at all of surviving. None of us were very good at learning fast, though. Most of us were not very good at learning at all. We were living in the safe place that we had made. We liked living in it. Living in it was good. It was sweet like icing sugar and as brittle as gingerbread. It was a safe place for sure but it could get a bit irritating at times. It could start to get on your nerves. People’s voices would become sharp and painful so that you’d wish that they’d shut up. Have you ever noticed how that can happen? You know that everything they’re saying is dumb and superficial and that’s annoying too. You don’t even have to listen to what they’re saying because you already know that it’s going to be dumb and superficial. Everything’s dumb and superficial in the safe world – that’s the price we have to pay. There has to be a price and that’s it! It’s a price you don’t mind paying though – you made the choice to pay it because the scary thing was so scary that it made you want to be safe in the safe place. You wanted very much to be safe from the scary thing in the safe place so you were very glad to pay the price. You couldn’t pay the price quickly enough! But all the same, that doesn’t mean that the dumbness and superficiality of the safe place doesn’t irritate the hell out of you because it does! Damn right it does! ‘Please just stop talking,’ you plead in your head because you’re so annoyed about how dumb the people sitting next to you in the coffee shop sound. It’s torture for you. They look happy enough, though. They look perfectly contented. They love talking stupid nonsense, obviously. They love it very much. They can’t wait to get the words out, they have got ‘pressure of speech’. They are competing with each other to see who can talk the most nonsense! Their faces are just like dolls’ faces. That occurs to me as I’m looking at them. They talk away but they have no expressions. They are playing a game but they don’t know it. They think that they are living their lives but they’re not. Their voices finally become so unbearably shrill that I have to leave the coffee shop. I have to walk out, my coffee unfinished.