Finally I am released from the hospital after a month of progression into a stable psyche with hopes to never again break into a fragmented mess of illusory, mental disturbances.
Only after asking the question “what just happened,” as it was happening, am I able to remember enough to later write it down.
I had buried the traumas of my childhood, seemingly normal situations that most other people go through but maybe not at such an early age – death and divorce, love and loss, bullying and revenge, drinking and drugs. Some of these stressors for me had the potential to be avoided and others I had no control over. One thing is for certain, none of these traumas were the reason for me being hospitalized.
I one hundred percent had a chemical imbalance that was so imperfect that it impressed in me the impossibility that I was more divine than an impregnated ego of an impudent imposter unleashing insanity unto the impressionable.
I thought I was divine and then I didn’t.
Vision became solid and real instead of an aqueous veil. Voices became valid and real instead of suggesting warfare. Synchronicity became casual. Delusions were boring. I was back from peering into the vicious storm churning viscous oceans of oil with deep yellow, swirling skies suggesting sulfur winds. I was awake just like everybody else, a soldier of breath ready to live another day without any threats from above. No more acid rain.
But I wasn’t like everybody else.
I was going to have to find out what had just happened to me so I could move on and make my next move at this critical point in a person’s life, the flip from full frontal fluidity to whole hemisphere hubris, to mushroom into the majority.
Instead of trying to penetrate the ground from above I was going to have to focus on breaking new ground from rock bottom. The surface that bore babies from below our feet, or so I imagined in my delirium. The same surface where gravity held grown men on their sides reaching upwards with one arm and in the other outstretched hand the ankle of the next man in the struggle for superficial strength. This is where I said I came from and where I also said I would never find myself.
I was relieved of hallucinations but I was left with a puzzle that I was going to work on for the next thirty years and beyond I’m sure.
On the surface everything was normal.
Francis Erich McElroy 