Part One: The Comedown My head is aching at the sides, a stabbing tingling sensation gripping the deep recesses of my skull. I think about you for the tenth time in as many minutes. The music on the stereo offers no solice, no solutions and no chance for peace but to stop the music would be to bathe the room in a crushing silence punctuated only by the sickness inside – a malaise that is incurable by medical science and yet weighs down every cell in my body. I am 23 years old, I feel about 90. I don't know what happened, what I did wrong or what -if anything- I can do to make it right. Perhaps I'm designated as someone meant to be alone, a sleep-deprived fool locked in his cardboard kingdom. It started so well, the laughter the warmth. But these things have a tendency to dissolve around you, disintegrating randomly into sweeping clouds of chaos and distortion.

'Question 23c', from Pre-Life Crisis series 2003.

Everything is fucked now. Everything. Temptation is a fatal flaw in the human plan and when in full swing it tends to take no prisoners. Confusion is the norm and a good researcher can get bogged down in trying to decipher the mixed and dizzy signals buried in acres of text.

Now I'm sat trying to avoid the harsh glare of daylight while I try to make sense of a disorientating and bleak evening. How did I get here? What happens now? Is it really over? We have our own seperate shit to deal with but then who hasn't in this world? The sickness is still in the depths of my guts. The burn from a thousand coffees and bleary flashbacks of boozy skullduggery in hot, dark nightclubs. The adrenaline rush for each high, the quiet depression after each setback. The thrill of the chase! The cosy knowledge that win or lose we have lived, if only briefly. And then what? Get back in the box and lie still until the next time someone dares to open it.

Too scared to hurt her with confrontational questions but too pent up to let it slide. Be cool man, go with the flow and just chill while the shivers run up and down your body and the weightless sensation of helplessness lifts you up into soul-oblivion. Seconds feel like minutes but hours feel like seconds. The world buzzes outside with an oppressive hum of activity. This is worse than an acid comedown. No hope of it blowing over in a few hours, no light at the end of the tunnel. You wonder what the point was in flying so fast and so passionately towards the naked flame that has now burnt you so badly. What really is the point in all this? The air is stuffy, conversations with people are disjointed and distant. Nothing makes sense any more, or even matters.

Outside you are decaying but inside you are already dead. You want to give up and slide into a warm deep bath until your brain is starved of oxygen and your senses dulled for the last time. You know this is madness and that you won't do it – life's too short as it is. Love is the drug but it's addictive as hell. You know that you'll be back locked into the chase before too long, only to repeat the process from fun beginnings to morose end. You start to wonder why it is that everyone else seems to have plenty of casual sex and be cool with it. You wonder intensely why other people's relationships last, pondering bitterly about how it could have been different. Mistakes you've made. Opportunities missed. Maybe you'll never find that happy balance. Maybe you're destined to die a sad and lonely old man with a handful of memories preserved in a box in an attic somewhere.

It is nearly the afternoon, you've nearly wasted the whole day doing nothing – unable to concentrate, reluctant to communicate. The afternoon will be more of the same.

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