AIN'T IT FUN?

              Is it more accurate to describe sleep as time travelling or immunity to its passage entirely? When I spend seven days in bed experiencing only fragments of consciousness, do I pause time or fast forward it?

When I was once asked to describe mania in group, I explained it as a funhouse mirror maze: fun at first, your ego relishes seeing infinite versions of yourself, but in your overconfidence, you walk straight into a mirror and someone laughs. There's no recovering from that bruise. A cycle ensues — each mirror you walk into doubles your annoyance, which in turn builds up recklessness that results in more collisions.

By the time you've crawled out, nose bleeding and head throbbing, you've become so used to a world of reflections that the absence of them is jarring. More significantly, it's boring. Normal reality might as well be a black hole, and before you've even managed to craft an alias for the crimes of your reflections, you become depressed.

I've only been in a funhouse thrice in my life but it really works as an apt metaphor for my existence. Distorting mirrors, sections of floor that rip themselves from under you, and escalators split in half that move in erratic rhythms.

Medication depression, a side effect of the adjustment period, is something else entirely. You've made it through all the rooms — the vortex tunnels of panic attacks, manic mirrors, paranoia of compressed air jets that keep you on edge — and finally the exit shines with green fluorescent lights. But you step through it and find yourself in yet another room. The real door is locked, the key discarded at the bottom of a ball pit, and you can only get rid of the globes by eating them. Your pick: stay here forever or turn yourself into a taxidermy stuffed with hard plastics.

A funhouse curated by Jigsaw.

The knock on my door is soft but I flinch. It cracks open and Baba peers inside, then, seeing I'm awake, slips through to kneel at my bedside. He reaches to pet my forehead, brushing back the baby hairs stuck to sweat. 'Habibi, your friends are downstairs to see you. I can tell them you're sleeping.'

Though I want nothing more than for him to do just that, I push myself up. He has already covered for me five times and it won't get any easier if I keep procrastinating it. So I rub my face with both hands and force sound to leave my vocal cords. 'It's calm.'

Baba asks if I want help standing up and when I shake my head, he leaves. I haven't moved a muscle when his muffled voice rises from the entrance. 'He'll be down in just a moment.'

I'm not. The ache in my muscles from lying in bed all day alone makes the task of climbing out of it take a dozen moments. My spine croons like rusty hinges when I bend over to pick up a jumper. I spend a minute trapped inside it simply due to an inability to muster the strength it takes to tug the collar over my head.

Their stares corrode my chest as I descend the stairs but I don't lift my own from my feet. I step between them without addressing either to open the front door and manage some sort of mumble about going outside. I hold it open: an invitation for them to leave and never come back.

They turn to face me a metre away as I close the door and remain on the step. The day is overcast and the cement is frozen under my bare feet. I curl my toes and shift my weight to the edge of my soles to minimise the surface area sentenced to suffer the cold.

They go on about how worried they are. They haven't heard from me for twelve days. I haven't answered my cell. They've tried to come see me five times, he's tried fifteen. My brain focuses instead on the chirp of hungry house sparrows that wait for food in the oak at the end of the street and I can't find the mechanism to redirect my attention. Eventually, their voices fall silent.

My hand jerks but I manage to stop it on account of Miles's text, the last one I did read: you rub your neck when you lie. I bury both hands deep in my pockets instead. 'I've got pneumonia.'

It surprises me too and I'm sure if I still had the ability to show emotion, they would tell. I've spent my fragmented consciousness over the past twelve days trying to figure out what to say but never settled on anything. Still, I've got pneumonia falls off my tongue with the conviction of a well-rehearsed plan.

'What? Are you okay? That's a stupid question. Why aren't you in hospital?' Words stream from Sonia in a high-pitched avalanche that finally overtakes the sparrow hatchlings.

And when Miles speaks, though his voice is clinically monotonous, the rest of the world mutes. 'You don't look like you've got pneumonia.'

I try to look at him. But I barely catch a glance of his frown before the overcast, which multiplies the sun hidden behind it a million times, blinds me, and I snap my stare to his hands. I suffocate a groan. My head throbs as if my skull has shrunk in the heat.

'It's mild.'

'So couldn't you send one text, like?' Despite the bite in his tone, he tangles and separates his fingers in the routine that testaments his sadness. Forget my skull, my heart shrivels.

I give an offhanded inclination of the head that I hope says I guess but I couldn't be bothered, which is true enough. Because I could have sent one text.

My hand escapes my pocket to scratch my cheek. 'Did you need somethin?'

'We've only not heard from you for twelve days. You missed Sonia's violin thing. I almost missed it too, didn't I? I waited for forty minutes.'

A flash of Miles waiting at the bus stop, alternating between checking his phone and glancing down the road as he allows two busses to pass until he eventually has to accept defeat at the third swells my throat shut. It makes it all the more difficult to cram my apologies into my stomach.

'There's about a million things I'd rather do than watch some random bird play violin for an hour.'

Sonia's face screws up. She rubs her chin furiously as if it's smeared with soot and she can't get it off. She stays silent, though.

Miles doesn't. 'What the fuck is wrong with you?'

I shrug. A lot of things.

'You promised you'd come.' Her voice cracks.

My head jerks to the side as though slapped by the second vision that adheres to my mind, this of Sonia, scanning the pews in the minutes leading up to her recital. The fall of her grin when she fails to spot familiar faces, the first friends she's ever invited.

Struggling through the ache in my chest, I give another half-shrug and suck my teeth. What a task: to convince them I couldn't care less whilst a knife I've struck into my own heart juts from my ribcage. This? It's an accessory. Don't worry. That's not real blood. Ignore it. Ignore the whole thing.

As long as I keep them angry enough, they won't notice. Angry enough to never come near me again. I'm a cluster of breezeblocks and I certainly am not going to be the reason the two of them drown.

'I've promised loads of things in my life. After I first saw Finding Nemo, I promised a zebrafish I'd buy it and set it free but my parents said no, so that didn't happen.'

Miles shakes his head, disappointment etched into every movement. 'It's a bit hard to be friends with someone who has to turn everything into a joke.' His words pellet into me and I stagger, nearly collapsing into the door. The bullets could nail me to the wood, let me bleed to death.

'Listen, I dunno where you got that idea, but we're not mates. I hung out with you cause you paid me, innit. Clearly, you lot can't take a hint.'

I reach for the handle behind me without turning around. Still unable to look up past Miles's jugular, I stare at it for proof of his hatred of me. I could pry the dagger from between my ribs and throw it at his exposed neck and the blood would tell me. I hate you I hate you I hate you. Good.

But I can't. I make do with the point of a paper aeroplane.

'Stop textin me.'

I open the door just enough to slip inside and shut it without looking back. Then I collapse into it, heaving as if I've raced a marathon. One of the hot pokers jammed between my ribs pierces my lungs which deflate and don't fill again. I manage only shallow gasps of air and the lack of oxygen quickly darkens the edges of my vision.

My raspy breaths are enough to alert Baba and his voice calls from the kitchen. 'Did your friends leave already? I'm just finishing tea.' Why has he made tea?

The bones in my fingers are about to snap from the tightness of my fists. I shove myself off the door to storm up the staircase, prying my jaw open long enough to yell behind me. 'They're not my friends. Mental cases like me don't have friends.'

I slam my door. My Fon ancestral mask falls face down onto the windowsill and the pile of now-obsolete school books collapses. The heat in my chest only expands. I grab my cell from my bedside, hurl it against the opposite wall. The battery flies out and propels underneath the dresser whilst the casing lands in front of the full-body mirror. Still burning, I smack my Bible onto the floor. Next, my Qur'an.

Then I crash onto my bed, out of fire but still smoking.

I ruin everything. Would you rather be an animal or a machine? A machine. I can fix it. Defence Antivirus Malware Detection Software whatever. Virus detected. Uninstall. Clean. Factory reset. Turn it off and on again. Clean. I am cured. Machines don't sleep. Machines always know the time.

I'm sorry. I only want to be clean. I want to know what time it is.

Two years. That's the time. Two years since I went to Edenfield and I still haven't paid Iya and Baba back. Not a single pence. It's my fault. Iya doesn't want to work thirteen-hour shifts. It's my fault. She wouldn't have to if they hadn't spent a fortune on my two months of hospitalisation right before a global financial crisis.

Baba's knock is determined this time. Not may I come in? but I'm coming in and I'm letting you know first. He swings the door open and leaves it ajar behind him. He has tea with him. Of course, he does.

'What's going on?'

I grab my Ikea Barnslig Flodhäst hippo and hug it to my chest, my voice muffled into its chin. 'Nothin. Just leave me alone.'

But the mattress dips as Baba sits on the edge. 'You're not a mental case, habibi. And if you were, you'd still deserve friends just as much–'

'Leave me alone!'

'Okay. I only want you to know that you're ill and it's not your fault–' His own gentle laugh cuts him off when I scream into the hippo. I imagine him shaking his head at me and smiling. 'I love you.'

This is what breaks me.

I ram the hippo to my face, not to hide my tears but the absence of them. 'I ruin everythin.'

'But you can also fix everything.'

With an airy okay, well that's that, let's move onto something else sigh I've only ever witnessed dads make, he presses his hands to his thighs. However, when his weight shifts, it's not to stand up but pick up my Bible and Qur'an from the floor.

The prior he places onto my nightstand after ensuring none of the pages are folded whilst the latter he opens in his left palm. 'Drink your tea. I'll read to you.'

I slide the hippo from my face to watch him, his proportions odd from my angle. Lying down, I can forget that I'm a foot taller than him, I can look up at him like he carries the whole universe with the Qur'an in his hand.

Pulling my cross from my mouth, unaware of when it ended up there, I interrupt before he can start. 'You know I, like... fancy boys too, right?'

Baba looks at me over the edge of the Qur'an. 'Yes.'

'Is that okay?'

'Of course, it's okay.' He squeezes my shoulder in a way that's compassionate without being offended that I dared doubt it. 'Everything you do or feel that is true and humble honours Allah.'

I push myself up on my elbows. 'Does Iya know?'

'Yep.' Baba is unable to fight a grin though he does his best to mask it as a cough and preserve my pride. 'I know it's hard to hear, but you are not as subtle as you think you are.'

Groaning, I bury myself in the Ikea hippo. They know everything. For how long? At the latest, Baba will have discovered it when he washed the sleeveless tee and jumper I had on when I came home from Summer. He's folded them into my dresser without remark of the fact Miles's name is embroidered into the label of the latter.

But they've known before that. That's why Baba let me go to the party and why he wouldn't stop grinning when I came back from Barua's without any Parma Violets. Did they know before I did?

'If you are... exploring your sexuality, that is perfectly fine, but I would much prefer if you didn't do that through porn. You never have a certification of consent and I don't want you to view sex–'

I scream against the hippo, pushing it so firmly against my eyes that stars dot my vision. 'Please don't. Please, Baba, please don't make me listen to this. I promise I will never watch porn. Please just shut up.'

Baba breaths a laugh but doesn't continue on the subject. 'Ah.' He has returned to the Qur'an. 'This is my favourite sūrah.'

'They're all your favourite.'

'That's not true. At least three are my second favourite.' He meets my peevish scowl with an ever-patient smile that tucks me into bed. So verily, with the hardship, there is relief. Verily, with the hardship, there is relief.