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“You don’t have to listen to negative thoughts,” someone once told him. “Thoughts are like clouds; they all pass you by, but you may choose to only watch the ones that please you.”

This made things worse. Ideas that had once held only ephemeral identity now gained a visceral power — became ill-omened visuals for his mind to latch onto and exacerbate. Dark clouds became raging storms, catastrophically tall and wide. Pale green sheet lightning gave way to glimpses of mutated figures crawling between the clouds . . . each time larger, more grotesque, till they loomed over entire hurricanes to leer down at him with raw flesh faces. The faces were familiar to him — but not from this life, and not from this world.

The storms soon intruded into reality; he would go for a walk and find himself trapped under a vast, collapsing tent of thunder and self-hate. He could not breathe. He could not breathe! He would claw at the air, physically, tearing his nails down through the black clouds choking him — but more cloud always rushed to fill the space. He saw his hands and did not recognise them; they were disfigured, bloody, knurled and knotted and violent, and he squeezed them tight enough to pierce skin and break fingers.

Only a very small part of him remained now. Some distant muscle memory would inevitably pick him up off the puddled, cold cement he had collapsed upon and put him on a bus home. Later, he would wonder why it bothered. There was nothing for him here, or anywhere . . . only monsters, only clouds. A personal hell of thought and fear and malignant beings come to snatch him back to an even darker realm.

Only monsters. Only clouds.