Flinch and you’ll miss it.

My mind had locked the doors and confiscated the key, and it had done so without apology. Without even a backwards glance because what was left behind those doors withdrew all too easily – for fear that that which appeared insurmountable really was.

The facts of the case are and always were irrelevant. Actuality has no place in this design.

What the mind takes it justifies with the most convincing lies, that make the most patently absurd rationalisations for one’s introspective behaviour and thought seem like child’s play.

This is not merely cognitive dissonance, or all-or-nothing thought or magnification or minimisation or any of a thousand other sub-types and categorisations of the turns and travails caused by the anguish that begins and ends in the mind.

No, this pain comes to me as a cold hard bitch one day, a smooth criminal another and a blue velvet cocktail the next – and it is something more than any of us are led to believe. There is no cheerful bon mot to sum it up because it defies you even as you claim victory on a battlefield drowned in red.

It is an empty-headed farce, a fool without foresight who drowns you in quick-witted motion. It is a mind-bending illusionist using the very things you hope for most, your trust and vision and potential, to make the world appear nothing more than a hollowed out shell of what might have been. What emerges is a black void in which even darkness cannot survive whole and free. It’s forever your something blue – the background radiation from a war you never intended to fight.

This is all something like crash landing on Formalhaut b and wondering why there isn’t a Starbucks on every corner. There is no map, there is no safe route to follow but rather a winding course that takes you through the chaos of the longest day. It is a day of unrelenting madness in which there is alarmingly little respite even for the good, the brave or the blind.

And if you can conceive the notion that this is any more than a road into nothingness, and if you come out the other side then you can only say with certainty that you are lucky.

Nothing more, nothing less.

All else that makes it through, that abides this terminal whimsy, you really can’t lay claim to because it’s merely an accompaniment to killing time. You wait and you wait, sitting as still as you can manage in the hope that you will eventually cease to mind the dull, pounding angst that builds in the day-to-day of it all. If you are quiet enough something deep within clings to the hope that you might just fade away, and that is the one defiance you can still afford.

You watch and you hear but after awhile you cease to envision or consider much of anything at all because you’re not sure that it really is worth the wait yet still, you wait because waiting is all there is to cross the seas and discover a new frontier. Surely in time you will be revealed as altogether, as altogether, as naked as can be and that which was hidden will come to light and then you might just see. And then you might just get the only thing you ever really wanted…

You might just get the joke.