I think that nowadays It has become increasingly difficult to lose one’s mind, but I’m fairly certain I have. I look for it almost every day and can’t find it. On the days I don’t look, usually when I forget to take this or that pill at a certain time, I lay down on my apartment-- not even “lay” though really; that implies intentionality which on those days I do not have. I exist on the floor of my apartment, in a near paralytic state, usually looking at the contours of my wall, a blackness at the edges of my perception that creeps ever closer, and I, unable to move, as if I were anesthetized improperly and could only wait for the scalpel to find me.

How can I have lost my mind if I am thinking and expressing those thoughts on this page? I would ask that, if I were reading this. There is a thing I call myself, a subject adopted out of practicality to express concepts, but this thing is a complex system. It is a set of inputs and outputs congealed into an overprotective sibling that has hidden my ego in the cupboard. I’m quite sure of it. Or at least it seems a reasonable hypothesis.

It explains the dissociation and explains why sometimes, when the wind brushes against my face in a certain way, or the rustling of leaves echoes through my mind like someone shouting into an old abandoned manor, I am sucked by a vacuum out of the cupboard and into the present. Sensory data starts flooding into me, unfiltered by the system. My categories become simplified. I am no longer looking out at the world through a foggy far away, glass. I always feel boyishly excited which turns, upon realizing the extent of the difference, the extent of the distance and damage, into feverish, desperate desire and invariably, it starts to fade. Thinking about thinking separates us from cows, but it is responsible for all of the most interesting forms of human suffering, the most exquisite of which is defined not by pain, but by recognition of inescapable distance from the real, made all the more perfect by the contrast of brief furlongs into the life you ought to be living, but are instead just watching pass by faster and faster in front of you like the ground viewed from the window of a speeding train that never stops.

We don’t need to move to rest. I don’t know why they started saying that or how it caught on. It always struck me as rather poor detective work on their part. They drop into my home unannounced, their fleshy bodies flopping about in the water, making all of my food friends flee, only to go completely still when they see me, as if I’ll suddenly think they’re just a piece of floating algae that’s temporarily misbehaving.

When I do decide to venture closer, to see what or who it is that has decided to bother me so, they burst into movement, lashing out with poles or flailing their way back to the surface and onto their little boats, only to come thrashing down again moments later in their strange steel boxes.

Eventually they leave, the metal teeth of their boats tearing into the water, causing ripples from their frenzy to wash over me. My mind will not quiet. I do not know when they’ll come again, when their pale little legs will once again start to dance upon my sky.

And so I swim, around and around until the pain in my neck is too much and I cannot turn my great white head anymore. I start to swim in rows. I can feel them watching.

Later on their boats, they’ll talk to each other grinning, high on their discovery, “This was conclusive. We’ve done it. They never stop moving. They rest as they go-- they never stop moving. We watched him for hours. At first we thought it erratic, but it seems as they grow tired at first they move in circles and then....”

I drift into the depths, my body a massive muscle that can’t relax, the sea behind me littered with the corpses of my food friends that they toss out into the water to taunt me. I feel some ancient hunger in me, but I will not shame myself by surviving on their charity. I will just drift. Deeper and deeper into the depths until my world is dark and timeless. I rest.