Visions of Hell, I
Stage one varies in length, but the form it takes is always the same. The cut-off is gradual and at first you will not realise what is happening. An unanswered phone call, a stranger looking at you askance, an acquaintance who ignores you on the street. These things are not unusual in isolation. But at some point, you become aware that they are increasing in frequency. Your loneliness creeps up on you like a thief. Late one night you realise that nobody has smiled at you in a week.
You fear that your thoughts are giving your face a hostile cast and make an effort to smile at strangers on the train, but their gazes only slide away from you in return, fixing mulishly on some unspecified point in the distance. You begin to check your appearance in windows and mirrors with anxious frequency, but nothing seems to have changed. All the obvious possibilities-body odour, an odd expression, an involuntary twitch-are either invisible to you or not present at all.
Yet the symptoms continue. At work, too, you begin to suspect that people are avoiding you. Nobody speaks to you unless it is absolutely necessary. When you try to make conversation with a group in the lunch room, they answer in monosyllables and find an excuse to leave. You are sure you can see them exchanging glances as you go.
Anxious that your busy life has made you neglect your friendships, you reach out to your loved ones, but by now the majority of your text messages and emails are going unanswered. Your closest friends take longer to reply to you; acquaintances no longer reply at all. Attempts to arrange meetings are met with vague excuses. Stage two begins this way.
When you try to call your family, they are civil but distant. Their voices take on the cast of someone tolerating a polite stranger. They seem busy. They ask if you could please call them back later. When you do, the phone rings out into nothingness.
Confused and abandoned, you try and turn to your friends, but by this time they, too, are no longer responding to you. Texts, phone calls, letters; it is as if your attempts to reach outwards are tumbling into a furnace, your words erased as quickly as you create them. Your online presence has become a long string of outgoing messages with no reply. Their dates of sending stretch back into the weeks and months.
At this stage, you begin to have the persistent sense that you have done something unknown and horrible without being aware of it. Terrified, you lie awake examining your own life in obsessive detail, finding each night a million reasons for your isolation, only to dismiss them in the morning. You cannot shake the feeling that the real reason is lurking somewhere just beyond your awareness, a cancerous twist in your unconscious mind.
Nobody answers their doors any more. You found this when you tried to visit the people who have turned their backs on you, in the hope of obtaining some sort of explanation. You stopped going to work when people began refusing to acknowledge your existence at all. Now you are running out of food, and you are putting off leaving the house because you are afraid of what might happen when you do.
These days, you check your own reflection compulsively, still searching for the clue to the terrible nameless thing that drove the world away. It has become inexplicably difficult to meet your own eyes. You do not understand why this is happening. You never will. But you realise now that it has been happening for a very long time.
This is the beginning of stage three.
You fear that your thoughts are giving your face a hostile cast and make an effort to smile at strangers on the train, but their gazes only slide away from you in return, fixing mulishly on some unspecified point in the distance. You begin to check your appearance in windows and mirrors with anxious frequency, but nothing seems to have changed. All the obvious possibilities-body odour, an odd expression, an involuntary twitch-are either invisible to you or not present at all.
Yet the symptoms continue. At work, too, you begin to suspect that people are avoiding you. Nobody speaks to you unless it is absolutely necessary. When you try to make conversation with a group in the lunch room, they answer in monosyllables and find an excuse to leave. You are sure you can see them exchanging glances as you go.
Anxious that your busy life has made you neglect your friendships, you reach out to your loved ones, but by now the majority of your text messages and emails are going unanswered. Your closest friends take longer to reply to you; acquaintances no longer reply at all. Attempts to arrange meetings are met with vague excuses. Stage two begins this way.
When you try to call your family, they are civil but distant. Their voices take on the cast of someone tolerating a polite stranger. They seem busy. They ask if you could please call them back later. When you do, the phone rings out into nothingness.
Confused and abandoned, you try and turn to your friends, but by this time they, too, are no longer responding to you. Texts, phone calls, letters; it is as if your attempts to reach outwards are tumbling into a furnace, your words erased as quickly as you create them. Your online presence has become a long string of outgoing messages with no reply. Their dates of sending stretch back into the weeks and months.
At this stage, you begin to have the persistent sense that you have done something unknown and horrible without being aware of it. Terrified, you lie awake examining your own life in obsessive detail, finding each night a million reasons for your isolation, only to dismiss them in the morning. You cannot shake the feeling that the real reason is lurking somewhere just beyond your awareness, a cancerous twist in your unconscious mind.
Nobody answers their doors any more. You found this when you tried to visit the people who have turned their backs on you, in the hope of obtaining some sort of explanation. You stopped going to work when people began refusing to acknowledge your existence at all. Now you are running out of food, and you are putting off leaving the house because you are afraid of what might happen when you do.
These days, you check your own reflection compulsively, still searching for the clue to the terrible nameless thing that drove the world away. It has become inexplicably difficult to meet your own eyes. You do not understand why this is happening. You never will. But you realise now that it has been happening for a very long time.
This is the beginning of stage three.