Adjectival Psychosis

I sat down. I exhaled slowly, quietly, and with a heavy heart. The silence hurt. I looked around the small eatery - full of bristling conversation, gabbing mouths, chomping jaws. I was separate from it, disconnected. In my own world.

A man brushed past me, almost made me spill my drink. He muttered a half-hearted apology. I didn’t notice. I thought about past events; how I came to this state, how I fell apart. I considered the influences of the gods - then realised such external influences do not exist.

I began to cry.

The third drink still didn’t make me feel any better. The peas seemed to stare at me in their menacing, unpalatable manner. I ignored them, defiantly. I resumed my train of thought. I had come to the conclusion that the cause of my condition was selfish acts. Performed by neither myself nor themselves.

By you.

They had lost power, they weren’t as important as they used to be. Not that it mattered. I needed to consolidate my position with myself. I did so.

The endless bickering between my id and my ego almost caused the other non-Freudian parts of my psyche to pack up and leave, but with my clever negotiation I convinced them to stay. Mostly.

Looking out of my world, I saw that the noise had stopped - the eatery had moved on, there was different surroundings. I dismissed it offhand. The relevance of it was diminishing, anyway. I gripped myself firmly and tried hard. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me, the symptoms, cause, and cure. The cure that I had grasped not three moments in time ago was relating to a different symptom. My symptom: melancholic perplexity. The appropriate cure: was not revealed to me at this time.

Then I lost it. The tight grip that I held on my mental faculties was lost, it slipped through my fingers. Now I was tumbling, falling, billions of associations flew past me at breakneck speed. I realised that I would not land for some time, if ever.

I took advantage of this descent and used it to try to come to terms with my situation.

It worked.

But now I was too far fallen to get back up again. With a strange splatter, my hopes were dashed against the zooming wall of my consciousness. Clutching desperately at the passing objects, I succeeded in fastening myself, maintaining a reasonably constant position.

My external awareness experienced a sharp pain. Wrenched out of my trance I became once again perceptive of my ‘true’ surroundings. I had fallen, and was in an uncomfortable position on the escalator. I felt for my ticket and got up.

Resuming my thought, I was once again interrupted. Someone was talking to me. I slowly surmised the meaning of the communiqué. This particular train line was closed. I departed the scene.

I sat down, exhausted. I could smell urine. I was aware that it was not my own particular blend. A deepening feeling of darkness and futility descended upon my wretched psyche.

Some hours later, the illusions troubled me again. A tall blue inquiring man. I moved as per its request. I knew I shouldn’t have succumbed to the chimera; but I had no choice.

Recommencing my contemplations, my mind worked rapidly. Elimination of the cause would surely cease any further effect: unless my flawless diagnosis of the symptoms was imperfect. The cause, the basis of which I had elucidated earlier: the infamous second person singular objective neuter pronoun.

You.

My accurate direction of events had so far served me well; everything had gone according to plan. Except this final mishap. My means of threshold crossing into my domicile was omitted from my presence. No matter: I would not allow the illusion to stand in my way of obtaining my noble ends.

Shards of glass still embedded in my shoe, I proceeded to the bathroom, where I happened to gaze upon my own ghastly visage - a shock which I confess I had not prepared for.

This troublesome delusion had forced an adverse affect onto my own exterior manifestation. I was not amused.

Ignoring both the delusions and the gloomy demeanour that had descended upon myself, I seated myself in a wash container. It was big enough for me, and my feet, unlike so much of my past. Something initiated the flow of water, and within a passing of time, I was immersed in a biting, sloshing, viscous fluid. I could feel it, and its movement had both a pleasing and a calming effect on my highly-strung self.

And the rest is history. Freed from the illusion, I was finally ready to purge the cause, and attain true sentience.

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