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The weight of responsibility has been shifted; I’m left spinning like an avalanche of wheels. A loathsome 4 year bed of nails has been endured and now been reclaimed. But a bed nonetheless, and one I fear I seek to debase in exaggerated overtones. This was not tenacity’s work, nor grim determination, but fear of the failure and hence an instinctive grip onto my circumstance. I learnt to shift my weight to ease the pressure of the nails.

But now that is over, and yet I am more hopelessly lost than ever. No, I never lost my grip but my parapet has evaporated and into thin air I am cast after all, legs pedalling like a demented cyclist, fingers chasing elusive rungs.

I’m left in an overpriced cave of a room with a tiny window that hangs the sky in its portrait frame. I lie with the familiar acrid taste of having gone too far; outside the trees are alive with a riot of birdsong. My head hurts like bare feet on a pebble beach; my nerves are piano-wire taut.

I spend minutes or hours combing the shoreline of my memory, trying to locate detail from amongst the washed-up debris. I cling to odd fragments in an effort at stitching them into some kind of sense I can feel sure and ashamed of.

After several hours or maybe days, I start to wonder whether the world still remains beyond my postage stamp of sky. Maybe the world ended and in my sordid lethargy I missed the roll call, was unable to respond to my name on the register as civilisation lined up to be neatly packed away into storage. Maybe the world was silenced by an agitated voyeur flicking through video clips on some far-flung web channel.

Outside, the trees have limbered up from the ground and begun an improvised ballet on the tiptoes of their roots. The buildings have given up and laid down their weary concrete heads in sporadic retirement. Bridges and railway lines have started to rebel, bulging and contorting in a structural tsunami hundreds of miles in length.

Outside, still success is a top-shelf commodity, power still caressed and cajoled by lovers anxious should anyone receive more of a share than they. The hungry still long to be fed, the lonely still long for love, the righteous still believe they’re right. The mad still think they’re sane, the sane still think everyone but them has lost their minds.

And still here I am, alone and waiting for my name on that register, still waiting for that next comforting bed of nails to be delivered, because without there is only nothing. And I fear I have not the time to wait for nothing to fall back into favour.