Drifting

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.