You Know When It's Time to Go Home

I always know when it's time to go home. Not always. I do know, sometimes, when I've been somewhere too long. It's when the strangers start to show up. The man in the hat shows up first, but after that it's a grab bag. Not really a grab bag, but something more like "I don't know you. What are you doing here," and the question never gets answered. It makes me afraid. The non-answer. The people that show and I roll through my reality tests and it comes back "not a number." Like today.

Today I was just a working away and having a blast doing so. I cleared the jam in the nail gun without shooting myself in the face. I cleaned things up and did some organization. And then the flickering started. It started off as easy mistakes of perception. Mistakes of light and shadow and I didn't discount them because you have to keep track of what is happening and where and when and reference and double check them against the time key of the day. And then things began to metastasize and balloon and bleed into other things. It wasn't a sudden thing. Not a violent attack. It was a creeping back of the skin from a pin prick. And the pin prick started to tear across my eyes. And I was scared.

Who are you. Why are you here. Why won't you say anything. My mind races against itself. You see them enough times and they get names. For familiarity's sake. Because you can't keep referring to them by description. But, also for tracking. You have to keep track of what is changing and how much. Who is coming. Who is going. Who and what you haven't seen. Who is talking and when. Systematize it as a survival mechanism. As a way to boil the confusion into simple yes and no questions. Not see through the fog as much as teach yourself over and over again that what you are seeing is nothing more than fog. Teach yourself that who you are talking to is a symptom of a malady and nothing more. Work on it. Work on it. And then work on it some more, because you can't afford to slip again. And even if you could afford another mishap in terms of recovery time you couldn't afford it in terms of scar tissue. Mental scar tissue. You don't have that kind of real estate to allow acres to burn and not feel it, not lose the trust of the people who have given you that trust. And it's hard and really fucking scary sometimes.

It's difficult to paint it. Difficult to map out the progression from flickers of black birds and creeping lizards, to the shadowed men in the corners of rooms, to the arrival of the children and the man in the hat, to the free radicals lurking between the bars of the stairwell and the thing that kisses time space like a fist into a pool of still water. The disruptions grow and I can feel the temperature changing. I can feel the movement of the pieces across the board in a way that I know will lead to a break. I can't stop it, but I can leave...