It is impossible to become disoriented in strange places. The more familiar my surroundings, the more terrified I became when they changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I’m sure my friends must have had difficulty understanding the source of my distress, for this precise reason. We were traveling on the road near my family home and they had probably hoped this would give me some peace.
The road shot straight along an embankment that spilled into the harbor. A rough wooden fence kept foot traffic from toppling along with it. I had always experienced difficulty seeing colors and excessive activity sometimes made my head spin, so I enjoyed the progression of empty water from darker to lighter shades of blue. We were traveling further away from the seaport, as though we were probing deeper into my own mind, closer to the remnants of my past. The house was on the hill ahead and the steamships laden with fish and timber were so far behind that they were nothing but a blur.
It was calm. Then the sky turned red. The red separated into a brilliant prism of glistening colors, as though the underside of the sky were lined with mother of pearl. The clouds were flowing with such speed across the sky that I had the urge to grasp them and pull them back, to stop the air around me from disappearing out to sea.
When my fingers touched nothing but the bare cold, I held my own face. I felt my spirit welling up within me. Something was trying to escape. Panic? Horror? Yes, these things were expanding in my chest like a balloon that was about to burst me open, but that wasn’t what was looking for an exit. No, it was me. The force of fear was merely the vehicle by which everything that I was would dissipate into the evacuated sky with all the rest.
I turned to my friends. They were two slender figures in top hats. They looked painted on a canvass that was stretching their features, making them skinnier, taller, and less distinct. The image should have been frightening for the grotesque distortion on their bodies, but it wasn’t. I would have still taken their hands in this form. The fear came from the fact that I could not. Everything was distant and formless, even my own hands and face.
At last, the scream burst forth. It was full and it must have been loud. My friends came rushing over. The scream indicated to them that something was wrong, but it was quite the opposite. Rather than signaling the loss of myself, the scream corrected the world. It broke the tension and made my home present again. Now it was my worried friends who were feeling the disorientation of a thing meaning something that it wasn’t, as my hysterical shouts began setting my mind the right way around again.
