Chapter 63

At the bottom of a lake I found my ring. Why can’t you see it?

I can’t be held responsible for my actions. It was the god’s doing. I can’t be held responsible for my crimes. It was my invisible friend Joseph. I can’t be held responsible for your death. It was all in my head.
And you want to know what crazy is? Crazy is when your reality and your dreams converge into one world. A fantasy world filled with more horrors than the worst of nightmares. It’s when you wake up sweating and gasping and lost and confused. But you don’t know why. And you can’t remember what happened that could have given you this reaction.
And you check under the bed and out the windows to see if maybe it was your conscious kicking in to warn you – except, there’s nothing there. And you know something terrible must have happened but you just can’t remember what it is. Well, being crazy is when you know what it is. When you walk into the room and the 6th sense is playing out in one corner and Bruce Willis is bleeding and that little boy is screaming and off in another corner you have the scariest animals imaginable and all your family being eaten by them – alive. And you want to scream out, but the people you came into the room with aren’t saying anything.
So you bite your tongue. You bite your tongue until it starts to bleed and then a nurse notices and stick a gauze down your throat so that you won’t bite that muscle off. Just like you bit your finger off last week when the piano tried to attack you or maybe you just got hungry.
And you don’t have any friends because no one else is living this nightmare with you. They just look at you. And you wonder why they aren’t screaming also because there is blood running down their chins. And you want to tell everyone why you shake all of the time, and why, even when you are sleeping you require the lights to be on.
And there’s a more normal version of you; you met her the other day. She’s little with blond hair and big brown eyes. And she’s got this great presence but you can tell that there’s something lying right there under the surface. And she looks at the disabled with a sort of disgusted look that resembles the look that your mother gave you when you killed your dog. It was almost a horror look – which is exactly how you felt.
But this girl is functioning and social. And she’s walking around but you know that she has those night sweats. That she wakes up every now and then with voices ringing in her mind and a small dribble of sweat running down her back. And it’s freezing in the room so you know that she’s shaking. And you imagine her on the ground, in a heap of clothing staring into the nothingness of what you see. Because she doesn’t have the invisible friends that you have, she’s just all alone.
They say it’s always the quite ones – you know better.