mindless

I wish I could tell you how I lost my mind

I wish I could tell you how I lost my mind. I’ve been thinking about it for months and months, what the best way would be. To tell anyone, really. How does a mind get lost? Maybe I never had it to begin with. I used to struggle to reign it in, back in the days of high school classes where I’d be staring out the window, not paying attention until a teacher called me out. Maybe it was always an amorphous thing that existed in some cloudy gray area, untethered, just asking to be swept away. Maybe it’s not such a surprise that one sunny Wednesday in February, it was suddenly gone. Without me noticing, it floated away, disappeared forever. I say that because though some part of it is back now, there’s still a piece that seems to be lost.

I think a lot about how your body can betray you, ever since it happened. The numerous diseases and illnesses and disasters, the external and the internal ways everything can get fucked up. Your joints no longer yours to bend at will, your control only extending so far. One thinks one’s mind will always remain intact, that ownership of the mind is just that. Ownership. A promise that can’t be broken. But that’s not the case for everyone. Not the case for me. For about three months last year, my mind was gone due to a psychotic break, a brief fling with psychosis, a semi-serious flirtation with delusion. It’s been over a year, but that time in my life is still haunting me.

*

The older woman on the subway has blue eyes like me. Her white hair is wavy and long, a little frizzy in the June heat, and she’s wearing pink-wire glasses. Our eyes meet the way strangers do and I look away quickly. But I can’t stop myself from stealing glances every now and then for the rest of my ride. When it’s time to get off, she stays on and as I step off the train, something tells me to look back. I do, and she’s looking at me through the subway window. At least I think she is. It’s a bit hard to tell and then the train has taken off again.

After that, I see her everywhere. At rest stops on the turnpike, at coffee shops, and on my walk to work. She’s always different, maybe she’s got brown eyes, or curlier hair. The only consistency is her age, somewhere between 60 and 70, and we always make eye contact. I pretend she’s me.

When I was 11, I read a book called When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. It’s a beautiful book about childhood, friendship, and time travel, one of my favorites at the time. Excited by the prospect of an older self traveling to the past to protect a younger version, I wrote a date in my journal “April 26th, 2011.” It was a reminder for my future self. Once time travel got invented, (11 year old me seemed to think it would be) that was when past me would instruct future me to come back to. I’m not really sure what my thought process was. So I would know it was real? So I would know I’d be okay.

So I pretend she’s me. Coming back as a sign, telling me that everything will be okay. That things get better even if they feel like they won’t. Maybe her mind was lost, once, but she’s still here, still here and even wearing a wonderful life she created for herself, one she got to grow old in.

I still wish it never happened to me. The truth, at least for me, is that losing your mind really blows up a person’s life. And I haven’t reached the point of turning pain into art, not yet. But at least she’s there and at least our eyes meet briefly on the sidewalk on the walk to my friend’s house and she offers a small smile. Sometimes she offers nothing but sometimes I offer nothing too.