I want to have a tantrum. A really big fucking tantrum of screaming and crying and lashing out and refusal. The simple refrain of a child becomes huge and laden with age: I don’t want to. I emphatically do not want to.

A child that can tantrum like that doesn’t have a sense of duty though does it? Because I can’t just not. I have to live, to clothe, feed and keep safe myself. Although I don’t know to whom I have this responsibility; is it me? All I can say is that it feels like living is something I have to do, even when I don’t want to, and however much I make it harder.

I was in love with this girl once. Well, if you’d asked me I would have said I was in love with her. But she didn’t love me. It drove me crazy for a while, but there was nothing to do but accept it. The alternative simply isn’t. Some things just are.

So I talk a lot. I conjure visions of grandiose activity and success. I wonder aloud and to myself that if only this could be the case, or if that was not the way it is, I would conquer my life and it would resonate with meaning. But it’s all crap. Wherever I am or whatever I am doing the I remains the same. The I remains despondent, lazy; I am anaesthetised, and through my stupor intimately aware that it is I who monitors my sedation.

The essence of my fraudulence is the fact that I can state any of this at all – that I know myself as a fraud. Acutely aware that nobody can change my world but me, I wait uncomfortably at the side of the road for someone who bears my face and my name and yet is not me. But the dust just piles up around me, and soon there will be nothing for anyone to notice.