Why, just the other day I was at a club in Manchester for a friend's birthday. I said goodbye to a few acquaintances and then realised that everyone I knew had left. The buses had stopped running and I didn't want to pay for a taxi, so I decided that I'd walk home: an eight mile trek in icy conditions at three in the morning. I was wearing plimsolls.
After about an hour and a half I came upon the spot at which I'd tried to kill myself in late 2008, and I thought I'd see if I could find the kitchen knife I'd left there, buried among the roots of a tree. The tree stood on a river bank, next to a field coated in pristine snow. I could see straight away that the roots were frozen, and I wouldn't be able to dig them out, assuming the knife was even still there. So I decided just to take a piss. The snow reflected the moonlight, seeming faintly luminous; I could see and be seen for hundreds of metres in every direction, but I was drunk enough not to care. It didn't occur to me until later, but I was pissing on what had almost been my own grave.
As I began to walk away I was startled by a rustling in the branches overhead. I looked up, but there was nothing there; it was just the wind. And then, suddenly, I felt utterly bereft. I felt that all the imagined, all the hoped-for magic in the world was a lie, and I remembered a recurring fantasy that I use to have as a teenager, staring out of a car window in the night at the bleak landscape rushing by.
In the fantasy, I'm outside in the dark, all alone, searching for something. I wander the wilderness for a long time, and eventually I find myself in the middle of a field, surrounded on all sides by nothingness. Wasteland. And then I begin to rail at the emptiness; I begin to scream at it, challenging it to produce something that I can't understand.
And then it does. Something rises out of the ground before me, something impossibly huge and old and inscrutable. Unknowable, save for one thing: it is evil. Utter, unmitigated evil. Also, it is completely indifferent; it would kill me without pleasure, without thought. And as I stand before this thing I feel complete ecstasy; I pray for this moment of revelation be drawn out for eternity. I would sit in the back of the car, in the dark, and cry tears of joy at the prospect of such a fate.
But as I stood by those trees in that snow-covered field, I felt absolutely certain that there was no evil in the world, and no good. Just indifference. I was overwhelmed by rage, and I began to recite the story of my teenage fantasy aloud, shouting at the empty world around me. I went from start to finish again and again, spinning out certain passages, trying to attain higher and higher peaks of hysteria. I spat at the air; tears flooded my eyes; I screamed into the darkness. It had nothing for me, and I knew that it never would.
Anyway, I got home at about six in the morning and went straight to bed. That was my emo quota for 2010. Good Night, and Good Luck!
