It would be nice to live in a sane universe.
Every now and then, something changes, very suddenly, and makes me wonder. Never important things. Sometimes a street light will blink out of existence. Sometimes I'll notice something that has always been there, but never was. For weeks on end, I would stare at the ceiling fans in the studio, counting them, watching them spin and wobble, oddly asymmetrical. Three were on one side of the room, and two on the other. And I would imagine, with the casual amusement of a self-mutilator, what it would be like if I stretched my arms out above me, felt a fan's blades dig into my flesh and release a shower of red droplets across the mirrors and the hardwood floor.
And then, this week, they disappeared. Three fans on one side of the room, and the other dominated by a thick black beam, corniced into the ceiling. I asked about it, and it is always embarrassing to ask things like that. The beam was always there. The asymmetrical fans never existed.
I wonder if it was the mirrors, even though I could not see at what angle the illusion could be possible. In the pit of my stomach is the dreaded knowledge that I've been making things up again. I've been pulling things out of my brain and altering my reality, seeing only a distortion that is destined to be ripped away. It lends an odd sensation of being violated, when this happens. I feel let down, betrayed, by my eyes and by a world that will not sit still.
I worry how much of it is my seeing what I want to see. I worry from time to time about the images I see of myself with a gun, holding hostage everyone I come across, demanding they behave according to strict, orderly conduct enforced by my own brutality. And I wonder if the sensation I have of inauthentic interaction is because they are truly synthesized, consisting of myself listening to them whimper and scream as I hold the pistol between us, making impossible demands, that they love me, that they feel, that they care at the point of a gun. And all that will ever exist is fear. All my mind will ever show me, to blot out that world, is their vacant smiles and pleasantries, disjointed gestures and hollow compliments, glossing over the true world in a veneer of normality.
If I ever saw that truth I would have no choice but to turn that gun on myself. So I watch the fans spinning, and I wait for their inevitable betrayal.