There are flashes, sometimes, where I think that I have gone crazy, that this is it and from now on I won’t know where I am or what’s really happening to me, that life from now on is a daydream and nothing else, that I might think I’m in bed with a lover, but really, I’m in a straitjacket and in a morphine drip, or that I may think I’m studying law, but I’m babbling somewhere on the ground. In a hospital. In a coma. Severely schizophrenic.

I’ve always been occasionally seized with the fear of becoming schizophrenic; I exhibit more than half of the warning signs for late-onset. But the episodes where I feel crazy, where I’m not sure that what’s happening is what I see, and vice versa, aren’t scary. They’re merely curious.

Yesterday after work it was snowing, and snowing hard. Big enough flakes that I could catch them in my mouth, and slightly quench my thirst. I couldn’t help doing that even though I was on a busy road and grown women aren’t supposed to be catching snowflakes in their mouths, so I got a lot of curious looks, some honks, one trailing hoot of laughter and a lone shout that was meant to be an insult, I guess, but I didn’t quite catch it and even if I had, it wouldn’t have registered. The sky was low and gray enough that the mountains were completely obscured, and strangely, it was sort of warm. The asphalt made the snow sparkle. I was waiting for the bus to take me to Barnes and Noble, even though I could have walked. I should have walked. In the state I was in I wouldn’t have even felt my feet hit the ground.

In Barnes & Noble I was in the bathroom and I was studying the pattern in the tiles. I know the tile pattern of every bathroom I’ve spent any amount of time in; the number of rows before a repeat, how they have to adjust to turn the corner or go up a wall, or, those crafty places where it’s both a corner and a wall. 3-D pattern adjustment. Obsessive-compulsive. On resumés I call it ‘attention to detail’. I forget I’m on the toilet, extrapolate the pattern to Spirographs and mosaic magnets, those indistinct games from when I was a toddler. The bathroom tiles in Los Angeles, the pieces that have been dislodged by earthquakes, upsetting the pattern and upsetting me in the process. I colored the holes yellow with crayons. I did. When I visit there years later I can still see the impressions.

When I snap back into myself and I’m still on the toilet, I have lost time and suddenly I’m not entirely sure I’m in the bookstore bathroom. It seems entirely plausible that I may have begun daydreaming at work, at the grocery store, at the tall pants boutique, and absentmindedly dropped my pants and assumed toilet position. Though this has never happened before, it seems likely that it could, that it is happening at the moment, that if I pinched myself hard enough I’d open my eyes to a new background... as if were dreaming. How do I get out of this? I can’t. How do I find out if I’m at work, in a store?

Wait for someone to shake me. Yell at me. Inject me with drugs, take me to the hospital. But the world feels so weird that I doubt any of those things would work. Any dream world that seizes me with tile patterns has to be too strong for such remedies. Any dream world that makes me feel this light and airy has to be a dream.

I walk out of the store. How much time have I spent? It’s still light, but the world has flipped. The sky is cloud-streaked blue and the sun is setting and it isn’t snowing anymore. The gray has evaporated. It feels like a different day. Maybe it is. The sun has brought out sparrows and women teetering on heels and the women’s heels look to me like bird beaks, pounding, pounding, pounding the asphalt.