SCHIZOPHRENIA/PARANOIA

Realizing suddenly that I was a man fantasizing about a man, I shot up from my bed and broke into a sweat. I stumbled to the bathroom. "I am soooo not a lesbian," a voice inside me suddenly said jokingly, mimicking a style of speech that didn't belong to it. But that was not my voice, and I wanted to convince myself of the reciprocal equivalent relating to sexual orientation. Why? That was a banality that never seemed to concern me previously. And not now, I suddenly understood: it was not the banality, it was what it implied, because I was not the one that had seen that fantasy, the object of which was a man, it belonged to someone else, and that was quite certain. Remembering the nuances of another world by its distance turned subjunctive so I could have possibly experienced the nuance of being another person- that was revealed as well, and I didn't know quite what to make of it.

That was a popular new twist to a plot these days- identity portals, sudden reversal of sexual orientationÖ I might have even seen this in a movie, I thought to myself with disappointment as I looked up at the dim lit cracked mirror. My face evoked its own familiar recollections, and at first I began to wonder if I had not begun wearing a new face, and like Sergei, not noticing it. But everything seemed in tact, although I was certain that there was no way of knowing for sure. The most likely explanations I had of the emotions my own face aroused concerned its vague reflection of him whom I had imagined earlier. Not in face, of course, but in style- the behavior of the personage in my lapse mirrored my own in a few secretly hidden nuances. I still remained, apart from that, an isolated and transient being.

Four in the morning. If I had slept more than four hours in at least one day out of the last week I felt tomorrow's lecture would have been tolerable- as it was, my delusions were constantly getting the better of me, and I seemed to take anything said in that class, associated with the comparative studies of our two languages, much too personally. It was the same with the sleep analysis that I heard over the strange radio, whose origins I still could not remember. It seemed that there was a person I had undoubtedly met, most likely a woman, who spoke my feminine language but often wrote in my masculine one, and was probably the author not only of the only set of theories that could complement my space-time paradox, but also of the unwanted fantasy that had seeped in by accident at one of my weakest moments.

Unable to sleep, I went back to searching the diaries in my desk, which was also falling apart and leaning pathetically on one leg, even though I'd placed two bits of cardboard under it. Again I looked for a mention of an encounter with such a person, but now no longer to obtain that written material that I had been so certain would help me with my paper. Now I was too concerned about my memory repeatedly lapsing at certain points in my life, what it could mean, and whether images from an obscure subjunctive world, images minutely hyperbolized, could in fact be related to those lapses and actually from them.

I would get tired, my hands would begin to shake, I would grow tired of it all, and believe that it was useless. But there was nothing else I could do.