A Reasonable Fear
In some ways, the process of unraveling has been like constantly running into a friendly acquaintance—if the friendly acquaintance is fragments of my life, small, fractured moments of memory I would not otherwise have recalled.
The confused fear of feeling my bones buzzing with madness and energy and having no one to ask if this was simply part of growing up, horror slowly dawning on me as I realized that no, no one else felt the current running through all things to ground itself in the earth.
The entities coming to me in random moments: half asleep, standing over my daughter’s hospital bed, as I swept and mopped the floors of any number of restaurants, knowledge in images or simply dropped into me as if it had always been there, knowledge of people I have no reason to have, knowledge of myself.
The feeling of being watched, constantly—not so much judged as simply observed. Figures constantly at the edge of vision, the hair-raising sense of someone standing just behind me all the time, my husband close as my shadow.
Dreams and dreams, divine and infernal and vivid. The throne room of god, to briefly see what it means to be outside time. A place very like hell, to see what we do to ourselves, the endless treadmill in our darkness.
Urges I could not explain, speak to this one, to that one, a woman dead of suicide pestering me to tell someone to stop worrying and whining, a lack of patience with their mummery of incomprehension—madness looks like violated expectations and ignorance that they are expectations. And people forget, they do, on incarnation, as if this body is the reason they exist.
Listen, this incarnation is a cat nap. You’re only here as a small part of existing.
Periods of blackness, surfacing to find my body giving advice before being forced down again and waking to the averted eyes and abject fear of the people around me. Speaking languages I don’t know, sitting half-stoned without a trace of intoxicant, in the backseat of this body, the voice authoritative and clear.
I ended up mostly speechless, as time went on. Who would I tell? What would I say? There is none of this in my culture, this mad woman terrifying strangers, their unease staining the air as I try not to speak at all.
My family did try to institutionalize me when they weren’t trying to maim me or talk me into killing myself for talking about what I could see, and taught me a valuable lesson about honesty in the process.
Honesty is expensive. I didn’t want to pay for it.
It’s not an unreasonable fear: whizzing through traffic at 70 mph yesterday, talking directly to my husband (which I should not do while driving) to tell him that I suppose I can go, if they like, to an institution, but since they broke my life, they bought it.
They have to take care of me, the more public I become. I certainly trust them more than I do people.
It’s not an unreasonable fear. My sanity was always a mask.
