Waking up in a nightmare scenario is the easy part, trying to stop yourself denying the nightmare scenario is almost impossible. The bath was the best thing on offer so I took it, for almost three days eating made me sick and dizzy, vomiting became a welcome distraction from the reality I had just walked into. Initially my mind just couldn’t cope with it and writing this twenty years later I guess it still can’t. Every time that Opus said the words Munich Syndrome I would just retreat to my stars and get lost in them like some drifting canoe. It’s no wonder it took me three days to ask about them. Even when I slept there was that latent fingerprint of a conversation with it, it wasn’t the schizophrenia talking I still believe it was the virus.

I finally had to ask the question I knew the answer to. Mum? I know that nothing can prepare you to watch a replay of a loved ones death on a monitor but if you ever have to be warned by my words. As I watched her stumble and heard her last words my hand pressed so hard against the screen that it left it’s impression on it, just as the images that you are seeing leave their impressions on you. It changes your reality completely, so completely that it becomes a physical sensation, a sudden transition, a rush and wham! Nothing ever looks the same again. Everything is the same but it is you who have changed, not the world.

Imagine smoothly changing places with your reflection in the mirror and that isn’t even close. It has a noise to it as well, a kind of splooshing sound as you make this transition. Then everything is absolutely fine, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic, I personally remember that calm that overtook me afterwards, it now makes me shudder. Because it is at that point that you have lost your mind, in that calmness and certainty that its all lovely, you have made a transition into insanity that you will never voluntarily come back from.