My thoughts are in a thousand-million places right now, trying to spread themselves thinly over a multitude of events that have occurred recently...
As if to give some indication of recent events, my body is covered with random injuries... The most noticeable is the long gash extending across my chin, obtained by falling on a rusty metal staircase atop the roof of the Cahill building downtown, otherwise known as the roof of Lost Dog Café... My right hand is swollen a bit from that same fall, and my right forearm is swollen from bowling last night for the first time since I was 12 and accidentally forgetting to let go of the ball in mid-swing, causing my arm to... well, do something weird...
And both my hands are covered with blisters and tiny pink burn-marks because my mind was a thousand-million miles away during work this evening, and I kept accidentally dumping hot oil on my skin.
My mind is still a thousand-million miles away.
My mind is on something strange that happened a few months ago...
My mother and I were in her car and had a few minutes to kill. She drove me around the block, to a corner maybe a half mile from the first house I remember living in.
"Notice anything?" she asked.
I looked around. Everything seemed in order. What was she trying to show me? The houses on the corner of the street were in order, no roofs caving in or anything... Except... There was something wrong. Something VASTLY wrong.
"There used to be a house there..." I murmured to my mother, pointing at a vacant lot that seemed natural enough.
"Uh-huh..." she said.
"It was... I can't remember!" I growled, frustrated. "It was brown... It was a brown house... It had... like maybe tan shutters, or yellow maybe... And there were... The windows were different colors... No... I mean... There were bottles in the windows... Different-colored glass bottles..."
I paused. "Am I going crazy? Wasn't there a house there?"
"Uh-huh," replied my mother. "It WAS brown with yellow shutters; it looked like a little gingerbread house..."
"When did they tear it down?" I asked, still feeling that horrible feeling of Something Wrong...
"I don't know," replied my mother. "I haven't seen ANY construction vehicles or diggers or ANYTHING... And besides, look at the ground..."
I looked at the ground. I didn't understand what she was trying to point out to me, although I felt VERY strongly that something was terribly amiss.
"No foundation," said my mom. Sure enough, there were NO marks where that house had stood; not even a squarish lump in the yard. It was as if no house had ever stood there. And if a house HAD stood there, it had been built without anything holding it down to the ground.
I cannot accurately portray the feeling of vertigo inside me at that moment. I felt like I was going crazy. I felt as if I'd imagined a brown house into being, and as quickly as I'd imagined it, it was gone. I felt as though there never HAD been a brown house on that spot, that I'd hallucinated it, created a false memory of it... For WHAT purpose would I create a false memory of a brown house? But the facts stood before me... Number one, I vaguely remembered a brown house ON THAT LOT. Number two, there WAS no brown house on that lot, and it looked like there never had been. Had I finally gone off the deep end?
The only thing that saved me from utterly torturing myself over the non-existent brown house and my possibly-non-existent mental health, was my mother, who also remembered the brown house and was at a loss to explain its absence. We puzzled over it together for a little while, trying to remember the last time we'd seen it, trying to imagine what could have annihilated the structure without catching our attention in the process... But we both remembered it, and so, even though it WASN'T THERE, it HAD been, and my uncertain memory of the house was at least corroborated...
I thought of this incident last night after Norman and I went bowling. He showed me this big old house at the end of a dead-end street -- it looked abandonned and had an eerie but majestic aura about it... We stared at it for a few minutes, and then trekked downtown for an adventure on the roof of Lost Dog Café...
Climbing up to the roof is incredibly frightening. One has to walk up three flights of fire-escape stairs, which was no big deal for me, and THEN climb a fire-escape ladder up to the top, which most certainly was a big deal... On the roof, there was another small staircase which led up to another small level of the roof. The staircase was missing some steps, which was how I fell and cut my chin open. But the view was just lovely. And kissing Norman atop the Lost Dog building at three in the morning made my knees go weaker than they'd already become from the climb. A single star seemed to get caught in his hair, and I reached up as if to brush it away before whispering, "I imagined it looked like you had a star caught in your hair..."
Today, I was reminded again of the brown house. I saw something, noticed something very briefly, a very small thing, and felt a sensation that something was amiss -- something I noticed only subconsciously... I didn't know QUITE what it was for over an hour. I'm not sure I saw what I saw. I'm not sure my mind is functioning correctly at all. And try as I might, I can't force my memory to become any clearer without the danger of imagination getting in the way. Did I see what I saw? Did I process it correctly? Did something get lost in the translation? Why would I imagine a brown house that had never been there? Why would I imagine what I thought I saw today -- a thing that was so utterly wrong, and yet so small and insignificant, and yet so absolutely imperative...?
Am I going absolutely crazy?
Once it struck me what my subconscious mind had seen today, I was unable to center myself in reality. I kept burning the shit out of myself on the fryers. I kept pacing around like an animal in a cage. I kept trying to write in my notebook while there was nothing to do, but the words didn't make any sense -- I could barely put a sentence together. I couldn't read the newspaper, couldn't comprehend anything except the thing I saw today that I couldn't have seen...
I have to sleep. I'm not tired. I can't quite seem to get my mind to stop whirling, to stop torturing itself with self-doubt...
But I have to try to sleep now. It's 3.30 in the morning, and doubt/torture can wait until morning, I suppose.
~Helena*
"Did you just hear what I just heard? ...That sound don't come from an ordinary bird..." --Wizard of Oz ("The Jitterbug")
"There must be some misunderstanding... There must be some kind of mistake..." --Genesis; the song that's running through my head.