mélomaniac

⛧ ─── ⋆ ─── ⛧

I spent months trying to determine where the fracture began. Whether it started in a bottle, in a prescription label folded neatly inside a paper bag, or somewhere much older, waiting patiently for the right combination of chemicals to unlock the door.

Everyone wanted a timeline. A clear beginning. A single moment they could point toward and say: there. That was the mistake. But nothing arrived that easily. The world simply became unfamiliar. Colors felt louder. Silences felt brighter. I began collecting meaning from places where meaning had never existed before.

Streetlights flickering at midnight. Conversations overheard through thin walls. Songs on the radio. Numbers on clocks. Everything seemed connected and deliberate. The universe leaned close enough for me to hear its breathing. Or at least I thought it did.

The terrifying thing is not losing reality. The terrifying thing is believing you have finally found it. Believing that everyone else is asleep while you alone have been granted access to some hidden machinery beneath the world.

I felt brilliant. I felt chosen. I felt watched. I felt hunted. I felt holy. I felt damned.

Every certainty arrived carrying its opposite. Every revelation rotted into paranoia the moment I touched it. And all the while I continued searching for an explanation large enough to contain what was happening to me. Maybe it was the medication. Maybe it was the combination. Maybe it was exhaustion wearing another mask. Maybe my mind is simply more fragile than I would like to admit. I still do not know.

What I know is that there came a morning when the fog finally began to lift and I looked back across the wreckage of my own thoughts like someone surveying a city after a fire. The prophecies were gone. The patterns were gone. The certainty was gone. Only embarrassment remained.

And grief. So much grief. Because some part of me had genuinely believed every impossible thing. Some part of me had built a cathedral from static and called it truth. And when it collapsed, it took pieces of me with it. Sometimes I still find them scattered in old memories. Fragments of conviction. Ashes of certainty. Ghosts of a person who could no longer tell the difference between a sign and a coincidence. I gather them quietly. I let the wind take them. And I remind myself that survival does not always look like triumph.

Sometimes it looks like learning to trust your own reflection again.