Last night in bed, after a long, exhausting, day full of brushes with frostbite and incompetent tooth-X-ray-givin', Dan asked me (not out of the blue; it was totally in line with our conversation) why I preferred not to consume pot. Like, what the difference was between smoking it and consuming it, and why consuming it was worse for me.

I gave him such an involved answer, detailing how it was so easy to eat too much before it kicked in, and then ending up stuck, no way back, with a way-too-high high, the kind where you feel like your brain's become maple syrup and is undulating around in your skull knocking into things and causing different and random synapses to light up for no reason before you're entirely prepared to deal with them, that even after I'd finished explaining it and turned over to try and go to sleep, I had described it so accurately that I felt exceedingly strange. Paranoid and strange and not very unlike being, um, way too high.

But I was able to fall in an uneasy sleep by shutting my brain down completely, and it lasted for about three hours before I woke up and felt, not high, but insane.

Literally, I felt like I had woken up into another person's brain. A frantic, obsessive, possibly post-operative person's brain. I'll never argue that I don't have neuroses, but I definitely don't have these particular neuroses, and there they were. Words, phrases, rhymes, were repeating on loop through my head and as hard as I tried to stop them or make sense of them, I couldn't. One I can remember was futon, crouton, and bowl. Futon, crouton, and bowl. It went through on loop so many times that my frazzled and shattered brain tried to come up with a way to make sense of it. And what it came up with was an exercise to see if it could figure out where a cat was most likely to be. But I couldn't manage that! I couldn't even manage picturing cats and futons, cats and croutons, or cats and bowls in the same mental image. Not for a long while. I just let it loop and tried and let it loop and tried again until I finally was about to think of a cat, sitting on a futon, eating a crouton, out of a bowl. Exhausted, I expected it to go away. But it didn't. The alphabet started looping. My breathing started sounding like letters. My stomach felt like a song was dancing on it.

Eventually I woke up Dan and tried to explain this to him, and got so sleepy trying that, mercifully, I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning feeling like I spent all night having seizures, but mentally, basically normal. Until now, anyway, where describing it is bringing it back.

Dan thought it was paranoid of me to guess that maybe a brain tumor was pressing on my brain and making me crazy, or that I had had a stroke. I concur, but it being paranoid of me has nothing to do with whether or not I do things.

It felt like I had a terrifying taste (another, that is; I have tastes spaced sporadically all across my life) of what it would like to be irretrievably crazy, lost amongst nonsense.

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.