Entwined in This Infinity

14. Insanity - Norton

This is schizophrenia, isn’t it? Isn’t that what this? Isn’t that what these visions are?

You don’t know anything about schizophrenia, but it feels better to have a label for it. You can sweep it under the rug like that, just smooth it over and laugh and say, “That’s it, that’s it, that’s why.” You’re pretty adept at that, after all: “The kids in my school are stuck-up, so they don’t talk to me. My mom doesn’t know how to stop talking, so I have to shut her up somehow.”

So this is schizophrenia.

It isn’t a hallucination so much as a knowledge manifesting itself visually. Truth seeps up and distorts what it touches into its true form.

Your mother is a beacon, a flaming torch of light, and when you speak to her she ripples and shrinks, as if a bucket of water has been dumped over her flames. Your English teacher is a twisted rat with a never-ending ring of shark teeth and crumpled ears. A woman in your neighborhood is a crawling slug who scorches the sidewalk as she slides herself forward. Someone in your grade is wrapped tight in vines with a dark space left open for their eyes, where a dead bird is tossed from occasionally. Once on the street there was a man who was made of vibrating air full of echoing screams.

Standing in front of the mirror, you are a cement statue. Your limbs and face are crude in their design, your fingers stubby blocks and your facial features shallow black indentations that are critical and grumpy even when you pretend to smile. When you speak, acid oozes from your mouth and down your chin, often bubbling and spraying others.

Wait, what, did you say, “Knowledge manifesting itself visually”?

That’s a lie. You’re forgetting yourself. It’s schizophrenia. Just schizophrenia looming over your mind and screeching a laugh over how foolishly you’ve begun to accept this “truth.”

It’s difficult, however, not to see the symbolism, no matter how nonsensical it is. It’s hard not to grumble a “good job” to the wilted flower in a pot of dry soil that sits beside you in history to see life flutter in its brown leaves, and it’s equally hard not to punch the raggedy vulture that plants tiny dark shards in the beings he interacts with at the supermarket. It’s hard not to feel it’s real.

But it’s schizophrenia. Totally.

You don’t spray acid, metaphorical or not.

A skeleton girl with her teeth melded together has a whisper for a voice. “No one really likes who they are.”

She sits across the room, but you slam your fist against the table and roar an answer. “How the fuck would you know? Maybe under all this acid and stone I’m a fucking saint. Knowing your flaws is the damn reason anyone wants to change in the first place.”

You blink and they’re gone. No claws or darkness or steam or fur or cogs or lightning. They’re identical with their round faces and arching eyebrows and five-fingered hands. They’re living masks of skin and bone and blood, everything fake and plastic and hideous. It’s like being blind.

This is what schizophrenia must feel like.