15 :

I wake in silence. Like normal these days. Most days I wake before the alarm. I wake before the sun. Before the dawn. Before even the chirrup of birds and the crack of light. Sometimes though, I don’t wake up, because sometimes I haven’t been asleep.

Silence is a beautiful thing. It teaches you to listen, not just to hear. I can hear the heating creak and the radiators fill with water in the darkness. I can hear the winds and cars far away passing by. I can hear birds fly and foxes run. I have missed those sounds.

I can’t sleep anymore. My sleep is broken – the calm waters before the storm have forever been torn. It’s as if what I know, what I dare not say for fear of making it true, has broken my nights in half, and in the middle where the would tore the two apart I wake in terror and fear.

Last night I slept properly for the first time in months. I had dreams – nonsensical, nonlinear images that reflected the inner me.

My dreams are scarred. I see visions of the way things could be. I see the sky black with smoke. I see buildings collapse. I see swarms of insects in fields modified by Man, spreading like a cancer, covering the earth, eating everything they can find. I see the moon red and violent with fire that falls from the skies. I see men in suits talking as they kill their children in foreign lands. I need to tell someone. Warn someone. Do something. But I can’t. I am trapped here and powerless in my dreams. When I wake, these visions are wiped clean.

My dreams are bullshit. I don’t know where they come from, or why. They aren’t visions from the future. They aren’t anything to do with anything.

It can’t be a secret unless you tell someone else and it can’t be a story until it is told to someone else. Even the Devil needs someone to boast to about how clever he has been. Evil can’t keep quiet. There’s no fun in being the architect of the Apocalypse unless your work is recognised. Evil has vanity too, doesn’t it?

And the Devil is going to boast about what happens next.

In six months time I will be dead.

I’ve realised that we are just made in another’s image, wind up toys, with no real freedom. Rats in shopping malls and drones at desks. Any concept of free will, individuality, is just a concept. This is an experiment, we are controlled by forces unaccountable, motives unseen. Our choices are artificially limited to a few set outcomes, our control reduced to the TV channels we watch and soft drinks we consume. Behind the field of vision, we are being watched, our responses analysed, our whole very civilisation is an experiment.

Pepsi or Coke is no fucking choice at all.

Somewhere God tumbles a dice and decides I will be gunned down in a back alley by a man with a handgun. Or under the wheels of a speeding car. Or in a bungee jump where I failed to connect myself to my harness. Just another pointless, meaningless demise.

Everything is out of our hands – at any moment we could be innocent bystanders in a war we neither support nor understand.

We are in that war now. Good and evil are wrestling for control of the universe and there is nothing we can do but watch and wait for the outcome.

You never value your sense of control, your freedom, or your sanity, until it is taken away. They tell me I’m insane, but the point is, you and I both know better. I’m not insane. Hitler was insane. There’s just ways of looking at a situation. Perspectives. Reality is just a set of perspectives from a certain point of view. There is no definite : just the consensus, the hallucination of the majority.

Imagine you are a caveman, sat at the roadside. You have no idea, or understanding of modern technology. You don’t even know what a car is. All you can see are reflective flashes of colour screaming past at incalculable speeds. That’s when you are in a situation, sat on top of it. Looking right at it. Can’t see the wood for the trees I believe is the exact phrase.

And so, if you step back and look at the situation from a distance you can see things the way you thought you’d never see them. You can see the road. You see the hills, the sand, the dusty wind-raped vegetation, and the vehicles moving from the crest of one horizon to another. Planes overhead and clouds.

From that distance, you can see a perspective that you might not be able to understand, but to be able to comprehend. This is my life. I cannot understand what is occurring. I can comprehend that the world outside my room is fucked. I can understand that the Apocalypse is coming. I can feel it in the wind. I can feel it in the air. I can feel it in the brittle whisper of the leaves.

These are the thoughts that keep me awake and break my sleep every single night.

I’m exhausted. I just couldn’t sleep. No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t sleep. My body had staged a one man mutiny against itself.

I wanted out.

And somewhere, someone wants me dead.