Pseudocide: a suicidal synonym and a synonym for suicide. The silent first letter, the tripling of syllables, the subtle opening act and the harsh sounding off of a powerful, destructive vowel. I suppose it was these beautiful intricacies of the word that led me to its execution.

Suicide itself has a certain appeal that every man, woman, child and priest considers at least once in their miserable lives. But pseudocide is only for the select few, the intellectual types who have had enough of this world to know of its horrors, tragedies and sadistic practices, but not enough to rid themselves of their individual loves and passions. They maintain the hope that, alone, they may find a peace, a love, some sort of spiritual plate to lick clean while the world considers them dead and lost.

When it comes to pseudocide, there are confirmed cases and rumoured ones. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn both achieved it with great success for a time, while others have tried and failed, found naked in a corner of the woods with ribs sticking out like silver shivs and eyes wild with failure. Those who have been found have learnt only one thing; to take away the pseudo and increase the magnitude of the cide. If there is one thing you need to know about pseudocide, dear reader, it should never fail.

Before I tell you how I came here, how I successfully hid from the world and started my life anew, I should tell you why. Why would I choose to fake my own death? Why would I choose to live in this abandoned sewerage pipe on the outskirts of Paris, with only a fountain pen, a pile of paper, a diary and an occasional visit from a prostitute?

I’ll tell you now that these treasures are more important to me than anything I owned before going off the grid and into the unknown.

 Material possessions seem to have a stigma surrounding them, the belief being that moments and interactions are infinitely more valuable than items, things, belongings. Let me tell you this is a lie.

Things matter to me. My fountain pen; it has lain in my pocket for the three months I have lived in this encircled entrapment. It is allowing me to write this right now. I would trade all the café conversations I have ever had for my fountain pen.

People are not loyal. They do not allow you to command them as you wish. They would never even take my suggestions into consideration unless I was dressed in my best suit with a check-book hanging from my front pocket. Those people I did business with throughout my years on the surface mean nothing to me. They meant nothing to me then and they mean even less now. Now that I have my fountain pen.

People are cruel. People are cruel. They are selfish. They only care about you if their dealings in your matters can somehow, even in the slightest, most miniscule way, be tied back to them beneficially. Those men I did business with are probably still like this now, even though they should know it is because of them that I am dead. My pen here does not reject my marketing strategies. My pen does not supposedly forget to invite me out for a drink at the cafe in the evening. God! How I would have so gladly met those men at the bar, would have happily drank down my rum with them and be seen amongst them as they stumbled home with an expensive woman in the fingers of their right hand and a cigarette in the fingers of their left. I would have been involved in their orgies of drink, their masculine, disgusting experiments between the four walls of the hostel bed. But they did not want me. They did not see the sadness in my eyes as I sat with my pen at the window. No. They did not want me.

You must remember, my reader, it is not just these men who made me so miserable that I chose to spend my life as a virtual dead man with a permanent needle in my vein. I am not that typical. I would not fake my own death just because I was not ‘popular’ amongst these sad, sadistic socialites. My God, would that not be the biggest tragedy?

 People do not reveal their horrors when they are simply drunk at the café. They reveal their cowardice, yes, but they do not allow insight into that terror of all terrors hidden behind the moustache of the wealthy proprietor. The human condition.

For years the death of Anne Frank has haunted me. While alive, I thought of her whenever I saw a girl in a knitted cardigan. I thought of her whenever I saw a run down building with a dilapidated upstairs. It was this same human condition that killed Anne Frank, the slow adaptation of humanity to guns and poison and men. It is this I truly ran away from. I write letters to Miss Frank here in my hideaway, letters that will never be read or delivered. I have often apologised to her for the horrors of humanity and for the cruelness of her final years and her death. I have written so many words of regret that I have become a breathing diary. What haunts me the most is that she will never know. She died not knowing that sometime, somewhere, a dishevelled man in a sewerage pipe would be profusely and repeatedly apologising for her years of intense mistreatment. Anne, again, I am sorry. I have died beneath your bleeding bare feet. I am encased in your forever pale face. I am so sorry.

The reader must realise my woes are due to humanity as much as they are due to Nazism. As much as I hate those weak boned spinsters, and I do with all that is left of my heart, it is what Hitler embodied that I so despise rather than the face of the man himself.

What Nazism taught us was that any man with a loud, shrill voice and a head that compensates for what lacks in the trousers, can turn other men into monsters. Men who once drank coffee with their wives, prepared breakfast for their children and would cut off their own leg so their baby could have three, were turned into soulless, malevolent creatures virtually overnight. Men are accessible and shallow; they conform to ideologies within a day just to confirm their own vain sense of self.

How cruel is the world, how cruel are its people, how long will they torture themselves and those around them with socio-political idiocy? Forever, I say, forever.

These loving husbands become robotic bodies once given a gun and even the tiniest sense of authority. The brain is a pestilent mistress. It taunts men into savouring bloodshed instead of tobacco. Doing right by a leader takes precedence over doing right by their beloved. Such is the case with anyone who has another working above them. To please their superior is absorbed wholly into the inferior’s conscious. They live by their code, and they die by it too. Such is the human condition, which has been manufactured over years of mutual wrongdoings. Such are the beginnings of my woes, for the horrible reality I must endure is that I am one of these humans. I hold this condition within me and am forever incapable of forcing it out. Oh God, oh God. I am human.

My months of hiding have tortured me into a sense of loneliness I have never before felt. The whore who visits me means nothing to me, and I even less to her. I am quite painfully sure of this. Loneliness is what drove me down here, yet loneliness is what I have found. I squat in this pipe and scrawl letters to my lives, write my sorrows into