I wanted to write a story called ‘My life as a Spiritual Outcast’. It was important that I should commit my story to paper I felt, or if not to paper then at least to some digital analogue thereof. I resolved within myself to do so. ‘The truth must be known’, I declared grandly, in appropriately resonant tones. ‘Say it like it is!’ I cried out excitedly, getting carried away by my own absurd and inconsequential rhetoric. I forgot that I didn’t know how it is, you see. I never do know how it is and this little detail had temporarily slipped my mind.

I had resolved to make a start on my long-awaited autobiography but I didn’t know where to begin. I could start with the Creation of the Universe, it occurred to me – which is where all stories begin, obviously enough – but that would make for an unwieldy volume. Or an unwieldy series of volumes, should I say. So that’s a non-starter, but it’s important to go through all the options. Not that I’d know anything about all that stuff anyway. I don’t even know that much about my own early life, come to think of it. It’s as if it had happened to someone else. Kind of peculiar really, I know.

‘Well, who would that be?’ you ask, bored as usual. ‘Who did your life happen to?’ I don’t know who though, I have no idea. It was as if my life happened to someone else but I don’t know who it was. ‘Why do you call it ‘your’ life then?’ you will probably retort, hoping to catch me out. It wasn’t really my life at all though – that that’s the whole point. The point, the point, and nothing but the point. It was never my life at all – I just thought that it was. I’d somehow got things backwards. Confusion had set in at some stage or other and as a result of that confusion I had felt that it was my life when it wasn’t. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?

I dreamt a dozen or so lives and I lived them all simultaneously, trying in series to figure out how I could escape this ‘hell of my own making’. Trying and failing too because they all came to the same thing in the end. No matter which way I played it, it always came back to the same place, it always came back to the hell of my own making. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that perhaps there simply was no way to escape from the hell of my own making.

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