I lie in bed and work. I work harder alone. I can focus. Sometimes there are no other thoughts when I focus. Then you come home – for lunch, for checks – you’re smiley. It’s not fake smiley, but I can’t help thinking that it is a little. Like your smiles might rub off on me (they do until you leave the room). So I say HI real bright so you believe me. I don’t know that you do. It’s like when I was crying and I say I’m fine and you say okay. It’s so much easier to say okay, than it is to ask what’s wrong. Because I don’t know what’s wrong, actually. I fell and I cried. Not because I fell, but because it reminded me I was sad and lonely, and a bit pathetic. You came out when I didn’t come back inside for a while to check up on me and you were genuinely upset. I didn’t want you to console me, to touch me. I wanted to cry alone. Cry ugly. Let the dog lick my tears and snot.

Someone told me I should go volunteer. Volunteering takes us out of ourselves (I’ve done it; it doesn’t). It’s like what Madonna said when she had Lourdes – how she had to stop worrying about her own shit. But like Madonna and the volunteering, you come home, you have alone time, and you don’t stop thinking.

Some friends ask if there’s anything they can do. But there isn’t. They want to spend time. But I don’t. I don’t want to talk. So I feel guilt when they’re around and I can’t answer, or it takes SO MUCH EFFORT to respond. Guilt is another one of the things you think about after the volunteering, after Lourdes.

I became an atheist recently because I realised it was all bullshit made up to control our ethics, so we’d stop killing each other. It hasn’t changed anything for me. I feel just as much in hell as I did before, thanks.