I am looking over my shoulder mentally like I have not rubbed down the gloss work
before adding a new coat of paint. I am free to feel this way. I know what to do.
Possible futures beckon. The present. I know when I am in the present. When I am
writing the present becomes… …all sorts of trickery. The future is in my mind when I
am typing. I am thinking ‘this will be read’ by someone other than me. I wonder what
they are like. I sometimes write the first thing that comes into my head. Other times I
select carefully the words, each word at a time, until I have a sentence. My novel
seems a long way off. Schizophrenia is a name. Imagine a picture book with words
then block out everything else and add the names of neural chemical messengers with
action names like ‘inhibitor’ to the picture book with words that are now speaking
loudly in your head. Your mind is fixed on a look, a word, a fear and it’s like a
doorstop wedging open the floodgates to paranoia/some other dimension/a terrible
place. You see a colour, yellow for example and suddenly you are being called a
coward or being compared to gangrenous discharge or typhoid diarrhoea. You see
ceiling and your mind counts the noises like white lines on the road, inevitable, evenly
spaced, there for a purpose. You peer and wonder about your peers. I made that bit up
– the bit about your peers but I have done in the past, I am not making you to party to
a conspiracy of mine. Just when I had your attention, as well. All’s well.
