Delusion (Part 1)

His brain felt heavy and sluggish. The mid summer thunderstorms left him lethargic and apathetic towards everything, but nothing in particular. His thoughts were a jumble of sentence fragments with poor grammar and all the wrong punctuation. Questions marks in place of exclamation points. Periods instead of commas. His eyes felt thick and wrong. Like two grapes inside of Jell-O that hadn’t fully set, swishing back and forth in slow, smooth movements. The thoughts in his head kept running on and on, falling out of his mouth before he had time to properly form them. They came out stuttered and broken. Beautiful ideas horribly disfigured by his improperly made brain. Maybe it wasn’t made improperly; maybe it was just general wear and tear, and not taking any action to complete minor maintenance when needed. Staring at a ceiling fan, trying to count the rotations, he found himself on the phone with someone whom he loved deeply, but would never make more than just a friend.

“Sometimes I feel like crying when I look at pictures of you.” He said, his left index finger following the fan blades around and around.

“I never like pictures of myself,” she said, her right hand picking at the chair she sat in, “they always look fake, like someone replaced me with a mannequin or something. It makes me itchy when I see myself in pictures. It feels wrong.”

“If you hadn’t moved then I could look at you and not pictures,” he felt like what he was saying was important, “and I could talk to you instead of crying.”

“You’re talking to me now,” she sounded worried, “or are you? Maybe I’m making this up and you’re just a figment of my imagination.”

“Maybe you’re just my hallucination from sleep deprivation.”

“No,” she sounded certain, “I feel pretty real.”

“I haven’t slept in two days,” he said it proudly, hoping for praise, “I stopped believing in God because of it.”

“Someone once told me God was everywhere,” she sounded far away, “but in the wrong context that could be really creepy.”

“Do you love me?” he asked sincerely.

“I have to go.” She said it quickly and hung up quickly, almost simultaneously.

He sat in front of his computer and responded to personal ads on Craigslist. His responses were always a mixed bag or heartfelt truths and bold faced lies, sometimes contradicting each other in parallel sentences. In one email he was a hopeless romantic looking for his future wife and hoping to start a family. In another he was a cynic, ridiculing marriage and vowing to never have kids. In yet another he was lonely and depressed, but hopeful at the prospect of meeting someone new. He would, and could, change his personality like a chameleon changing its color, to blend in with whatever the situation called for. He stared at the rain hitting the ground outside violently and realized he was lonely, and he thought lonely thoughts, and decided he hated what he had become.

“I want you to meet someone,” his roommate said, she had been standing behind him, listening to his thoughts, “a friend of mine.”

“Why?” he asked, offended, “I have my own friends.”

“There’s never anyone here!” she said, “You’re barely here usually, even when you are. And you never leave, you just sit there.”

“I’m never going to meet this person,” he had lived this situation before.

“You will if she exists. If I make her be here,” she sounded triumphant.

“Whatever,” he tried to look and sound as uncaring as possible, “I won’t like her.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“Because she’s just like me,” he stated matter of factly, “and I hate myself.”

“I never said she was like you,” she was looking out the window now.

“Oh,” he deflated, “sorry.”

“It’s ok,” she said closing the window, “but she is exactly like you.”

He conceded and consented to meeting this friend, with anxiety tagging along every step of the way. He stared at the wall, using it as a movie screen to project all his self destructive and self defeating thoughts. His mind seemed to play out every bad, horrible, awkward, humiliating, boring, and uneventful possibility possible. He felt like the subject of a very intense, yet very uninspired, documentary. 

2011