Life, a provably pointless endeavour, has few thrills that entertain me at all. The only joy I ever really receive is risk - the thrill of consequences, pain, or death are my only escapes where I really feel anything at all. The rest is nothing more than numb. Even my skin feels numb to the world and touch around me. My body doesn't exist in a crisp physical state where movement is registered; I feel like a marionette cut from its strings, being wafted around in the waves of a shallow beach, discarded by anyone who once cared, long lost in the memory of the audience who once pointed and laughed at the act. But like that piece of wood, I never felt like a human amongst them all.

The only times I ever feel what I assume feels like humanity and life in my body is when there is danger around, whether to my character or life. The only time I've experienced any resemblance of passion is flooring it at night on a windy road with no lights, with only a vague idea of what lies behind that bend - and a faint hope that the wheels lose traction and you smack into a tree. Then you get home. And is there nothing worse.

But one other event in my life stood up like a tall, like a tall thing surrounded by shorter things: when I used to dump brown behind the office I worked at in 2019.

The funny thing is, I didn't even need to go all that bad, and there was a toilet right by the building entrance. But obviously, it wasn't about the shit, it was about doing something so human, so free, without permission in a world where permission must be given. To open the sphincter to the world on another mans land, his domain, right outside his castle, and unleash - a freedom few experience.

It was raw. The cold air would shoot up and tickle my skin, shrinking the ol' Borises and Johnson - or maybe that was the nerves of doing something so wreckless. You see, it was known somebody in the office was doing this. The CCTV cameras just weren't tuned to look where I dropped dung and, exactly to my plan, I had been going uncaught but constantly exposed to a higher degree of risk. But that risk of being caught is exactly what made it so freeing.

I'd walk to and from work and, in those woodlands, I'd strip down in a small clearing and lay bare on the ground, sun or rain, just for a few minutes.

You see, most people are conditioned to feel safe, separated, and elevated from their base instincts and biology. They wear clothes for warmth and modesty, hiding their forms, bones, flesh and rolls of fat away from the world under a mask of woven synthetic fibres.

Most people cannot recall the feeling of lying naked on a forest floor, feeling every rock and stick poking into their back and legs, the cold earth drawing heat out from beneath whilst the air above whisks away the rest. You may shiver from the cold, but accepting that this experience will not kill you, will not harm you, and later you will be warm, you may find solace enough to rise above it and just be. There is no physical experience that can be felt that cannot also be ignored with enough presence of mind. Much like being waterboarded, giving up information is an admission of your low moral fibre, not one of survival and preservation. Pain is temporary, death is forever, and I yearn for both.

The sad truth is that, in modern civilisation, we are expected to be beings we simply are not. We must find humanity in the margins, pull at the frays and see where the string leads, rather than sew it up into the ordered structure that society calls for. They say we're supposed to be stoic, rational creatures, far above the animals, but the numbness that comes with it removes everything that got us here, that was worth living for.

I am cold, naked and afraid, shitting in the wilderness not because I want to, but because I need to in order to feel alive. I am not comforted by triple glazing, internet speeds or carpet underlay. I am comforted by becoming the animal.


THIS IS THE END OF THE ARTICLE.
Please spend some time reflecting on it, whilst searching for an un-specified number of words that may or may not appear in the grid below.