text: When I was a kid I had a monster at the end of my bed. It wasn’t like everyone else's monster, all teeth and scary eyes. Mine was different. Every night, when the lights went out, there would be nothing at the end of my bed. A horrible, ominous mass of nothing, looming in the dark. Some nights the nothing would touch me. Those nights were the worst. I would be engulfed by a feeling like coldness. It wasn’t cold though, wasn’t anything really, but it was like cold, like the idea of cold. I know that doesn’t quite make sense, but that’s what it felt like. When the nothing got too near it was overwhelming. I could feel it pressing down on my chest, making it almost impossible to breathe. The nothing would loom over me, an inch away from my face, too close. It didn’t have any recognisable features, wasn’t anything close to human. It was just a mass of nothing at all. A big, gaping absence. I can still remember that exact feeling, being a small child paralysed by fear. An indescribable terror, of nothing. Nothing physical, nothing real, nothing I could explain. But, like all kids and their monsters, I grew out of it. The nothing stopped appearing at the end of my bed, and eventually I thought about it so little I almost forgot about it entirely. Now I had proper adult things to worry about like taxes and climate change. I was about 24 when I noticed it again. It wasn’t the same as before, but still, i recognised it. My nothing. It came back so gradually I didn’t even realise it was there for so long. I was at work, sat at my desk, trying to focus and refocus and focus again on something deeply meaningless. I felt something like coldness. Not cold, but something close. Time shifted, I couldn’t tell if it had sped up or slowed almost to a halt, but it had changed. The wave of nothing slowly abated, but I don’t know if it ever went away entirely. It came back again the next week. I had been walking to the station. The wind hit my cheek, but I didn’t feel it. Or I did? But not as much somehow. It was as if I knew the wind was on my face, but I knew it in a different time, or a different place. My walking became somebody else's. Somebody I was watching. Like playing a game, I was controlling a character, I knew it was mine, but somehow it wasn’t me. Over time the nothing engulfed me. It filled my body, compressing me into the centre of myself. I no longer touched the edges. Everything I saw, felt or did was through a thick membrane of nothing. It began replacing parts of me, displacing them with absence. Like a parasite. It ate parts of my memory, I would lose names, whole people and moments of my own history. It took my joy, and my sadness too. It was totally indiscriminate. I was small, inside myself, and everything was so hard. I fought so hard to even exist. I was fighting nothing, there was nothing there. Nothing oppressive, nothing parasitic. Just me. I’m not a little kid anymore. There are no monsters under my bed. I am scared of nothing.