From The Start (George Daniel/Matty Healy)

10: ITS THE END KIDS

"It's like..." The air grew still, grew cold: quiet, complacent, with the pause. With the way his words had faded out, slowly like the steady rise and fall of his chest, just an intake of words, just a moment to think and watch the rain fall. To watch it fall gently against the windows: cold glass, half covered by blinds, all in shades of off white. The whole room indeed, seemed to exist in only shades of off white, but the rain, the rain hit the glass with a steady pounding like the footsteps of dozens of small children, like it held all the innocence and wonder left in the world, and every single colour too.

It was June and every colour stuck in his throat like poisonous gas, like a part of the world that had suddenly become foreign: something for his body to reject and repel with every ounce of force left in the world. But it was June, and he sat there alive. He sat there alive and well, with the arms inside of his mind, reaching out and grasping, grasping for a hope, for a simple concept, for a simple idea of what it all might mean.

For so long it seemed hopeless, frozen in thought and time, like the words in his throat. Except nothing had stalled around him, and he did nothing to stop his eyes from watching the steady ticking of the clock with an intense obsession. He did nothing. He sat in silence. The two of them did. Except it wasn't hopeless, because he had seen hopeless first hand and where he sat now was worlds away, and unquestionably so. The proof of that lay simply in the inevitable: the very moment that everything came together.

Four thirty eight. Almost to the dot. The ice around him melted, his hands grew warm again, and he watched the rain, he watched the passing of the world outside, in its thousands of colours, and breathed. Breathed. Properly. Not with shaky, shallow breaths, but with a wholehearted motion, with his all given to his lungs, and finally coming to untie the knot that had wedged itself deep inside his chest. That was when it had began to all make sense. Finally.

He'd found comfort in the temporary silence, in what he knew would come to pass, and to the extent that he faced reluctance in letting go, but he did so regardless. Because suddenly the world felt so light around him, like no longer a solid great heavy weight, but just grains of sand, seeping through the cracks between his fingers. As the rain worsened outside, perhaps letting go was all that there was left to do.

But it was four forty one before he opened his mouth to speak again. They had time, but perhaps never enough. Still, he hadn't come to sit in silence, to wrap his own worst thoughts around himself a million times over, smothering him like a fog that he could never escape. Still, it was four forty two before the words actually came out.

"It's like it's the middle of summer. A hot summer, where you lie down in the sun, and to the rest of the world you're just sunbathing, but you physically can't get up anymore because of how much your skin has cracked and burned. It's like everyone around you is praising the warmth, the gentle summer sun, but they've all somehow forgotten that it's burning, unbelievably hot to the touch and it hasn't rained in months. Like there's a drought but suddenly you're the only one who needs to drink to survive. No one can help you, because no one can understand and you can't make them understand, because they don't see you burning out there in the sun, they see you lying there wasting away, you're lazy in everyone else's eyes. It doesn't matter if you don't think you can get up, because you have to get up. Everyone is either yelling at you to get up or they've walked on, they've left you out there to die - they've given up, and eventually everyone will. So you have to pull yourself up in the end."

He felt his lips drying around the words: innately opposed to letting them out, to slipping the truth in its purest form, to spinning the world on its head in the hope of making better sense of the mess of indistinguishable letters and words when you were upside down. He wanted more than anything to stop talking, to close eyes, and to let the nothingness that lay behind them swallow him whole. But he didn't.