It started with yellow marks on my cheekbones, but now I can physically feel the skin beneath my eyes shudder with every jolt of the bus. My eyelids threaten to close forever, burning with a welcoming heat each time my lashes cross.

I tell myself every day that I’ll be in bed at ten, lights off at eleven – but that plan is never successful, and I realise when I collapse into bed at 1 or 2 or 3am that I should have kept my daytime state of mind into the night.

But nine o’clock hits. The messages pop up in the corner of my screen and the phone rings, all filled with desperate friends and lovelorn brothers. They send their tears through the wires and I fight back those of my own. I lecture them on their idiocy, console their misery, advise their dillemas. They end the conversation with thank you so much and hang up or log off without asking how I am.

Fact is I’m on enough medication to sink a ship and I surely am sinking. I need someone to ask me how I am. I can’t wake up screaming again.