When you started studying, the days seemed grey and endless and pounded on your head like a cluster migraine. They were a persistent type of grey where you thought that that the sun might never shine again; that perhaps even your memories of the Sun were placed there by God just to increase your suffering.
You couldn’t stand it. And yet you did.
University and all that it had promised had been cruelly juxtaposed with the reality of living in a hall of residence covered floor to ceiling with antiseptic surfaces that were somehow never clean. Nothing seemed to matter. You couldn’t connect with anyone you met until the time you got drunk enough to mention the Little Man.
That night you had methodically drank a bottle of cheap whisky and joined them in your antiseptic shared kitchen. You had sat with them and you had listened and you had smiled with your mouth and you had laughed with your larynx and you had winced at both yourself and the wooziness you felt inside.
You don’t know why or how you started talking.
You had been trying your hardest not to say a word in a vain, deluded effort to fool these people into thinking you weren’t as you were – that, in fact, you were just like them.
“Yeah,” you must have said (about what you have no idea), “like the Little Man.”
And they must have looked at you with eyes wide and confusion in their faces. They must have said What? or What the fuck? and laughed.
And on autopilot, for there was no other way you could have said it, you must have finally let it all out.
You must have told them about the Little Man that sat in your childhood “playroom” (which was really just a little corner of your living room with a blanket tacked up over it) and about his little blue chair that you could never touch. How the chair was the slightly larger than a doll’s chair and how its gnarled form seemed to grow from the ground.
You must have described how some days the Little Man was there, sitting stolidly on his little blue chair, and some days he was not. And you must have described his wizened little head with his long white beard which flowed like water - for if you mentioned him at all, you must have mentioned these things.
You must have explained that you weren’t allowed to look directly at the Little Man and how you had always known this. That no one could have told you not to look at the Little Man in just the same way no one could have told you about the Little Man. You must have explained that from before you were even able to form the words to explain that there was a little man sitting there, you knew well that he was not to mentioned.
And that it wasn’t just that you shouldn’t mention him: it was that you couldn’t - it was an impossibility. To think that anyone would be able to talk about the Little Man would be a category error. Like thinking you might detach your shadow or that you could eat Mathematics.
You must have told them that you had always assumed that everyone else could see him too until, one night, when you were safely - safely? - wrapped up under the covers in your bedroom, where he could not see you or hear your thoughts, you asked yourself if this were actually true? Were others really aware of him like you were? Or were you - you alone - the only one who knew about the Little Man?
And that the day after you asked yourself this, he was gone.
And you hadn’t mentioned him after that. No, you had never mentioned him. All things were as they had to be in this universe. Your shadow remained attached to you. Mathematics was inedible. And not one word left your mouth about the Little Man.
And yet, that night, there in the kitchen, you somehow broke the omerta. And, drunk as you were, you knew you had done something very, very wrong. You wanted to vomit. You felt as if all the dread that had been pooling inside you had finally burst open and the horrors that lay hidden beneath the surface of the world were being released.
But you stayed sitting on your cheap plastic chair the same as you were before, looking from the outside just like a human being, whilst you gripped the underside of the chair as if your life depended on it.
And then, to your surprise, they said: Yes.
Yes, the Little Man had been in their houses too. And, Yes, they could never look at him. And, Yes, they had never been able to speak of him until today. Until just now.
And then you watched as they calmly reached their hands to their faces and began to peel them off, bit by bit, layer by layer, from skin to flesh to bone and when you thought there was no more that they could possibly remove, they peeled off one more layer to reveal the Little Man inside. Except this time, this time you were able to look directly at him. And he was smiling at you. And you tried to scream, to throw yourself to the floor, but you remained unmoving on your little chair, forced to look upon his grinning face.
Then you awoke. You decided that the Little Man had been the horrifying realness of the alcohol induced dream. But your conversation? Well, that felt solid, somehow. That night you had spoken of the Little Man. You had somehow detached your shadow and feasted upon Mathematics.
And, days later, when you finally gained the courage to re-entered the antiseptic scene of your crime, you nodded to them and they said “Hi” to you and you said “Hi” to them but the look in their eyes told you not to mention the Little Man and that they too were deliberately not looking at the space next to the sideboard where a little gnarled blue chair was growing up out of the ground.
But at least you weren’t alone anymore.