Three wasps. Three.

They were waiting for me when I went back to my room. Earlier I’d been sitting working in the front room when one flew in through the window and started buzzing angrily around the lamp. It took all of my courage to approach it, stick a glass over it and take it outside. I hate killing things. Detest it in fact. Almost as much as I detest wasps.

But there were three in my room. Which is half the size.

What was somehow more unnerving was that they weren’t flying around most of the time. They were crawling quite casually (if there is indeed a nonchalance to how wasps move) over my bookcase near the door. First I thought there was one, having heard it buzzing as I went to shut the window, and retrieved my recently commended wasp-catcher beaker and newspaper to snare it back outside. Then, as I crept closer to it with the glass upturned, I heard another flitting irritably around the inside of my lampshade. And I ran away. I think there was even a small degree of girly flapping as I ran. When I came back I could make out three.

And now they’re all dead, their axons well and truly poisoned with pyrethroidic toxins. I really do hate killing things.

The stupid thing is that I don’t want to go back to my room now - I can’t go back to bed. All I can imagine when I think of going back in there is the sight of those ferocious little Eumenides crawling insouciantly all over my Argos bedsheets. So I’m lying here on the front room sofa, aching all over with tiredness.

And all I can hear is buzzing.

In my head, I’m fairly certain. It’s just another symptom of my wasp-related paranoia. I’m being driven slowly insane by the ghosts of the insects I reluctantly Raided to death. In my dozy state I’m starting to hallucinate, and occasionally see little black and yellow blobs darting angrily about the corners of the room.

I’m also trying not to think I’ve killed off some sort of avatar of divine will, having only earlier this evening left a candle burning on a patron statue beside the open window, before going back to writing my novel - a story thick with symbolism regarding the Moirae/Fates. And then they came - Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos - the three ladies themselves. And how did I greet these ancient purveyors of human destiny? Why, I sprayed them in the face with neurotoxins of course, just like they used to back in the day at Delphi.

A scientist of course would tell me not to be so foolish, but I would retort that the scientist’s religion and associated beliefs are surely just as valid as mine. And then I’d probably point out the absurdity of quantum theory, and the scientist would no doubt have to shut up, or clumsily change the subject.

How many wasps make a swarm? Should I be worried about a nest? Isn’t it a little late for workers to be hatching if there is a nest? Where would the nest be, and why haven’t I noticed it before?

I really don’t want to go back in there and find out.

Mum do u know what i can take for runny stools? It’s really bad and i’ve got a sore bum.

Last Thursday was another one of those bipolar sort of days I’m now starting to get used to. AC/DC Thursday, where life is nothing but an alternating current of opportunities and chance, and you’re just an electron at the whim of whichever way the flow of things moves you. But this has nothing to do with brain chemistry. This isn’t the familiar ‘buzzing in your head, waking up in bed with someone you’d rather shoot, walking down the road against hard and cold molecules pushing against your every step’ sort of thing. This is the world itself gone cyclothymic. And you can tell by the weather. Thursday started with the usual way all my days have started recently.

Blind panic. Terror.

There were the usual three, maybe five seconds of insidious bliss between waking from a fitful sleep in the cuddly warmth of my own bed, and then the sledgehammer on my chest as I remember. As it all comes back to me with the heaviest heartbeat I’ve ever felt. As my heart beats faster and faster and I forget how to breathe. “I’m chronically in debt. I can’t get a job. My bank doesn’t care and just keeps on charging me anyway. I can’t pay these charges. I tell them this but they just keep charging me. What’s the point in continually charging someone for having no money anyway? I don’t have any money. I’m totally broke and I’m increasingly in debt. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

Stress occurs when the mind is not able to handle day-to-day events and challenges.

Get up. Walk around for ten minutes trying to calm down. Chain smoke to a disgusting degree. Remember I’m only twenty seven, and life can’t be like this forever. Only twenty seven. Twenty seven. Realise I’m twenty seven and life should be much better than this. That most of my friends have decadent things like savings, or impossibilities like their own home, or even insanities such as a wife, husband, or child. Somehow my collection of dusty Star Trek videos and a dogeared promise to one day finish a novel doesn’t really compare with that. Twenty seven. Give up trying to calm myself down - I’m obviously useless at it - and plod on with the inevitable daily campaigns of the war that has become my life. This Is A War.

Ring my bank. Go through infuriating automated call system for ten minutes tolerating questions designed to tax the patience of the slowest five year old. Eventually find something that could be considered the right department for my request. Type in my convenient two hundred and sixty seven digit card number on demand. Type in my date of birth. Wait in a queue for half an hour. Believe less and less that my call is important to them. Finally speak to someone with a thick Indian accent who wants to call herself “Susan.” Go “through security” with “Susan” which causes no end of problems because all the questions on her script involve me confirming regular amounts going into my account. “I don’t have any,” I reply. “Susan” then asks me for regular amounts going out of my acount. “I don’t have any,” I reply, “unless you count the charges I’m constantly getting from you.” “Susan” does not see the funny side of this. I don’t blame her. Discover that my bank have not, for the third time, done what I’ve asked them to do. Begin to lose temper with “Susan” when she tells me I am going to again be fined for going over my overdraft limit, despite this latest infraction in fact being their fault because they didn’t cancel my direct debit as requested. Point this out to “Susan” who makes a sort of audible shrugging noise down the phone. Hang up, another £50 worse off than when I started this morning.

Panic is the result of an excess of autonomic nervous system activity.

Can start to feel an anxiety attack coming on, so roll another cigarette - the logic being that it is clearly in fact oxygen that my body needs to be weaned off, as its withdrawal causes panic attacks in the first place. Then decided to ring my mother hoping she’d make me feel better.

Quite what I was thinking I have no idea. I must have been out of my mind.

What with the smoking and the general panic attackness I was obviously feeling suicidal, or at the very least irredeemably self-destructive. As the phone call went on, being told as usual how much worse her problems were than whatever it was I could maybe be perhaps going through, I started to tune out. My mother’s voice just became that of a distant jabbering bully, but I stopped listening. Someone once said that your parents never really see you as anything but the screaming lump of pink flesh whose nappy they had to change day in day out years ago. Sons and daughters on the other hand always want to believe in that smiling summer day deity, who kisses scuffed knees better and promises you an ice cream if you’re a good boy or girl. Someone who makes everyone okay. I just want my mum to be my mum again. Sometimes I just want her to hug me, like she used to until about ten years ago. Fat chance. Hang up.

When I rang my dad afterwards and he agreed to lend me some cash I very nearly burst into tears. He didn’t give me his disappointment, didn’t give me any lectures. He didn’t tell me how insignificant my problems were and how much worse life is for him. Suddenly, after weeks of waking up to french-kiss total panic about my financial situation, I now have enough to begin to dig my way out of debt and do something about getting rid of it and getting more work. And indulge in the most ludicrous luxury of actually eating something. Actually eating food. Tomorrow I may celebrate by going mad and buying some eggs and a value loaf, and having fried eggs on toast for lunch. It’s a little tragic that my current financial situation deems such things as luxuries. I am so sick of chasing the heels of scurvy with pasta after pasta after pasta. Pasta. Fucking pasta. Pasta is incredibly dull. There’s only so much you can do with it bar painting it blue before you realise you’re living on a very dull diet of flour and water.

It’s easy to tell who your friends are. They’re the people standing next to you. It’s so simple, but you only really find that out when you need to. Always. Every time. Without question, protest or excuse. I really do not deserve the support and love I’ve received in the past few months since leaving work, and I can only try and return it to those who offered it so readily - the listeners, the cuddlers, the chefs, the beer-bringers and wine-wagglers, the cigarette donors and fiver-bungers - everyone who’s given me as little as a smile when I’ve needed it, you all give humanity a good name.

I need to plough on. Every day makes me more and more a full time writer, largely because I’m amassing rejection letters (the second arrived on Saturday, WITH my undelivered postcard I might add!), but also because I’ve again started, for the first time in ages, waking up and wanting to write. After speaking with the very charming playwright Jane Bodie, I’m still desperately trying to get hold of the elusive administrator at The Royal Court to get onto her 26+ scriptwriting course later this year. There’s also a very exciting project with an artist that I’m waiting to hear back on, that involves compiling short pieces of verse and prose to go with his paintings in a book being published. Sigils crossed.

Swytayju.

It’s good to be slowly feeling busy again, but busy in things that matter - not busy as in chasing my bank every morning to find out what charges I’ve incurred today or what request of mine they still haven’t done. It’s refreshing to have, at least, just a few weeks to wake up each morning without remembering The State That I Am In™ and feeling cripplingly unable to get out of bed to do battle with the debt-demons that cannot be defeated.

Sometimes I worry I’ve spent so long fighting for my soul that I didn’t notice it slip out the backdoor, bound for sunnier lands. Other times I just wonder why it didn’t take me with it, and let this fleshy form get on with its ephemeral footsteps, unfrustrated by my own crazy and unsung aspirations that have nothing to do with the body, society or the respective everyday insanity of both.

I’m outside on my balcony. Everything’s where it should be. My laptop is on my lap, my cigarette and its ash are in the ashtray. I’m glugging Port from the bottle and the sun is shining. Peri The Jasmine Plant needs watering. iTunes is playing and the song lyrics are singing to me - ‘make your own kind of music, even if nobody else sings along.’

The world is alive with taunting life - a hornet buzzing beside me, for one. They say their stings are out of this world. A magpie perched upon the roof. “Hello, Mr Magpie.” Hornet loves the jasmine, but is disappointed by her drying leaves.

I’m sitting here trying to write, trying to think, trying not to remember who I am and The State That I Am In™. I’ve been thinking about, you know, stuff. A lot of stuff. What I want to do, where I’m going. Boys. I’ve been thinking about boys. Why I cannot really fall in love anymore. Whenever the last time I ever really did I can no longer remember. Have I ever? How impossible it is to survive in human society without their god. I understand my fellow human less and less as I get older and older. If I lose any more weight I’ll slip through the next drain I walk over and wake up with the trolls.

Have brain will eat itself.

All I ask for is a long coat, and a street to walk her by. There was a town once, a little town by the sea. Perhaps I left my soul there. Things seem to be moving on much faster than they used to.

But still, with these tired lungs scratched with smoke and burnt with ethanol, there’s the breeze. Oxygen’s weird, ain’t it? It’s always there. You can always breathe the world in wherever you are - sip the cool breeze like you did lemonade when you were little. In. Hold. Out. It tastes different sometimes but it’s always the same ingredients. There’s nothing happening here. Nothing going on but life.

I’m afraid of the hornet, sating itself on the dry leaves of my plant. I go back inside my human cave for another day. Cry, run away, run. The world is a cruel, beautiful and frightening place.

Let me try and explain what it feels like. I’m assuming of course that you have no idea, but there would be no point in my writing this if you didn’t.

It’s like someone’s gone out and left a light on in a house. It’s a 100 Watt bulb. But it isn’t just one light. They’ve left every light on in every room. And three televisions on as well, tuned to different programmes in different languages. Blaring out. And the stereo. The stereo is playing a thrash metal band whilst the wireless on top of it hums a crackly Bach Cantata. Both phones are ringing. And the microwave is making popcorn. And the dishwasher’s washing knives. And the glare of a computer’s monitor burns flickering fragments of half-glimpsed data into the world. And a washing machine spins laundry, round and round and round, again and again and again…

No. No, forget all that.

Just imagine a motorway. At night. Like those long exposure photographs you see of just lines of the bright white and red lights of cars whizzing past like electrons along a static path.

Imagine each and every car is an individual thought, yet thoughts you can barely distinguish as individual because they are moving so quickly, and you’re already exhausted from lack of food. Know that somewhere in the blur of lights is the crippling certainty you are simply spiralling further and further into debt with no way out. Know that lost in the haze you can hear the tooting hooting Judas that maybe you shouldn’t have been so cocksure in quitting your job now that you’re seriously considering prostitution as a way of paying the rent you’re so heart-stoppingly behind on. You can just make out the familiar engine of every relationship you ever attempted, never lasting more than a year, some barely lasting a month, and always wondering if it was your fault that it ended. Always wondering if all your relationships will end before they begin. Sense in the dizzying chaos the irrational but concrete certainty that maybe, just maybe, you’re not remotely worth it at all. You know that you don’t even try anymore, that you’re just another frightened human with absolutely nothing special to their name at all but the excuses they made and the particular brand of TV trash they watched instead.

Be aware of everything you know and fear.

Keep it all in mind - shove it to a corner for now. Let it set your pulse racing in terror, but now think of everyone you call a friend. Everyone you’ve heard say they love you - people you would go to when you need help, support and comfort as you have so willingly helped, supported and comforted them.

Now imagine they’re all gone.

Imagine they’ve moved to another country. Imagine they no longer respond to your emails or phone calls and try not to think if this means that you are suddenly no longer to be considered as worth their time. Imagine calling out to those around you, but they look away, or don’t understand what you’re saying. Imagine the first person you ever met, the person you thought would always love you no matter what, has reminded you of how utterly insignificant what you’re feeling is. How whatever it is you’re going through is peanuts to the problems of real people. Imagine realising you have nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide from the beast as it closes in on you, sits on top of you, its weight upon your chest cracking and splintering your ribs as panic pushes its full weight down onto you. Panic, and then the cold and damp clasp of utter despair. Imagine the certainty that you are lost.

Imagine realising that you’re totally alone.

Imagine all that. Imagine that this must be what it feels like to slowly lose one’s mind as one loses all things - money, love, friends, self-belief. Imagine feeling yourself succumb to crippling blind panic. What do you do?

You keep going. That’s what you do. You carry on.

You survive.