I sit here in the amber darkness, pleasantly drunk on fruity toxins that tug on my thoughts like children on their mother’s skirts. Two decades and more have not immunised me of that harsh orange glow that outlines my midnight world.

I stare from my window, my portal from comfort to the outside world. All that I am rests at my back while nature’s shaded husk greets me through the glass. There are no stars, only an indistinct blur of civilisation that consumes the heavens like oil on water. What was once fields, woods and marshes now stand in regimented rows of brick and plastic watched over by tall guardians of fluorescent light. Darkness is but a ghoulish shade of our minds.

Before me, blocking my view and blinding my jaded eyes like God upon Mount Sinai stands one such guardian. It fills my mind and my world with amber imaginings even through closed curtains and eyelids. All that it truly protects is my insomnia. My insanity. This beacon of society surveying my sovereign kingdom, as foreign as the square sun that rises in my dreams, as familiar as the eyes that have looked upon it their every damned day.