Like your alarm clock is a rollercoaster and you start every day with your stomach dropping as the G forces pile up.

Like the soundtrack to your Hitchcockian day is a synthesizer that plays staccato dissonant chords in the highest octave right before the climax.

Like a nightmare in which you’re running through a maze trying to connect back with a person who is also you. Only you never get out.

Like you forget who you are now any time someone’s needs outrank yours and all you can do is read the script for what you would do if you still had access to care, to love, to empathy, to humanity.

Like you have stuffed your mouth with cotton balls to stifle the screams because you don’t know what else to do.

Like you get the thing done because what other choice do you have, but the cost is that nothing else can be done.

Like water takes too much effort to drink because the faucet is in the kitchen and the cup is too heavy and drinking means peeing and the bathroom is so far away.

Like you’re constantly wondering if you’re missing a final exam in ten minutes.

Like your father’s gone away and nothing is safe until he’s come home. But he might never come home. But she’s there. And you’re going to pay the price of his absence.

You get a burst of energy and suddenly you were a fraud and it was all you exaggerating for effect.

You hit a brick wall and anything you ever did that might have had value was a delusion.

Like reality is a Möbius strip and gravity is a lie.

Like you’re flying a plane over the ocean at night and the artificial horizon is broken. The system is telling you to pull up when you really should nose dive. But you can’t trust yourself. You pull up and the engines stall. You’ve now wasted all your fuel.

Like you know it’s going to end bad and you’re just there to make sure it’s even worse.

Like a debt collecting interest you know you’ll have to pay.