Recovery: a work in progress.

Daylight.

I clamped my eyelids closed. So tightly shut that I swear I could have curled ten kilos with either of them. Expecting my brain to liquefy in that instant before I retreated into the total darkness I craved.

Needed.

And yet, there was no pain.

None at all.

So I waited. Halfway between worlds. Between the dark and the light. The living and the dead. The past and the present.

But I couldn’t stop the noise.

The rip-saw howl as my skull imploded. The crushing noise. The…

The silence.

I lay awake, waiting for it to stop. For the onslaught to begin again. For the return to the end of my life .

And still nothing.

Just a feeling of nausea. Bundled up with… hunger?

I dragged my eyelids open again; ready to retreat.

No worse.

My room was quiet, the sash window open and the fine gauzy pleats of the net curtains billowed like Monroe’s dress. Birdsong layered over the soft noises of a Sunday house. A woman singing softly, the radio turned down low. The sounds and the smell of bacon, frying.

Bacon.

Bacon.

Heaving myself upright, I sat on my bed; looking at the bunchings of my bed-clothes, the scatter of my pillows and the lone shape of my duvet, still clutched tightly to my chest.