Observations placeholder

Matt Haig - Reasons to stay alive  

'You could always pretend to be ill,' my new girlfriend and future wife Andrea said.

'No, I can't. It's assessed. It's assessed!'

'Jesus, Matt, calm down. You have turned this into something it’s not.'

And then I went to the chemist and bought a pack of Natracalm and swallowed as many of the twenty-four tablets as I could manage. (I think about sixteen. Two sheets' worth. They tasted of grass and chalk.) I waited to feel the calm that was promised.

But it didn't happen. Itching happened. And then a rash happened.

The rash was all over my neck and hands. Angry red blotches. My skin felt not only immensely itchy but also hot. The seminar wasn't until quarter past two. Maybe the rash was a stress response. Maybe I needed something else to calm me down. I went to the union bar and had a pint of lager and two vodka and limes. I had a cigarette. With ten minutes to go before the presentation was due to begin I was in the toilets in the History Department, staring at a swastika some idiot had biro'd onto the shining blonde wood of the door.

My neck was getting worse. I stayed in the toilets.

Silently briefing myself in the mirror.

I felt the power of time. The power of it as something unmoving.

'Stop,' I whispered. But time doesn't stop. Not even when you ask it nicely.

Then I did it. I did the presentation. I stuttered and sounded frail as an autumn leaf in my head and messed up the slides a couple of times and failed to say anything at all that I didn't have written down in front of me in my best handwriting. People didn't giggle at my rash.

They just looked deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

But halfway through I became detached from myself.

I derealised.

The string that holds on to that feeling of selfhood, the feeling of being me, was cut, and it floated away like a helium balloon.

I suppose it was your standard out-of-body experience. I was there, not exactly above myself, but above and beside and everywhere all at once, watching and hearing myself in a state of such heightened self-consciousness I'd actually burst right out of myself altogether.