Do not underestimate my fear of being alone. For someone so extraverted; who thrives on new experiences, the new emotion pushing its cold boney fingers through my skin is shocking, unexpected, and not welcome. My gut is performing my personal interpretation of War of the Worlds, pricking my stomach lining with a dull ache, an ache where the butterflies should be. In fact their fragile wings have turned to ash seeking to poison me with undeserved sentimentality. I am being torn apart like leven bread at my own last supper, drowned in wine and saturated, swollen like a suckling pig at the farmers table.

My body is tomented by 1000 pins, taunting my flesh with small irritating pricks that lack the power to break the skin. Every pin sings a love song in a small, out of tune, strained voice, a sound made more horrific by booming voices; disapproving self-righteous grumblings reverberating through the chambers of my pounding brain. The sounds and sensations are driving me mad like the beating of the tell tale heart. They all come together in a montage of sounds and images that make me fall to my knees, out of control. I feel like i am falling apart, layer upon layer, peeling, cracking, crumbling into a ball, scrunched up and discarded; kicked and shattered like day old snow.

Where has it all come from? The entire experience is like waking up in a strange place with little or no recollection of how you got there, turning and facing the dire realisation that you are totally, uncontrollably lost.

Everything is so alien, the physical and emotional turmoil coursing through my veins, fighting with my senses, is leaving me exhausted and empty, confused, vunerable and longing - so much - for the solution to this constant state of proverbial atrophy freezing my muscles, making them tremble.