'Tis Madness

I was suffering from schizophrenia¹, then I went insane.

There is a pathogen out there that can take you from normal health to delerious sickness and back in under nine hours. I don't know if it's viral or bacteriological, but I suspect that it's contageous.

Last night I dreamt that I was geology, the strata itself. I was being deposited in streams and rivers. Deep red mud. I was burried, uplifted, faulted, melted, lithified. All felt at once. I saw my history before me; moving events superimposed over each other.
I opened my eyes and then I was two simultaneously, the rock and the man. The hermit and the hermit shale formation. No man is an island. I was a flood plain. I couldn't move except in shutters, spasms; faulting, earthquakes. I yearned for original orizontality, but I was tilted. It's been a long time since I wished so hard for a cold lenolium floor and a toilet to curl around the base of. I needed to throw up, a crevass splay. I needed to eat in order to throw up. Sediment in, sediment out; deposition and erosion.

My shoulders hurt, my knees hurt. I scratched myself, bloody, hematite leatching out. My flesh rotted and I palpated my bones. Fossils encased in the strata. I was full of footprints. The hermit shale, pennsylvanian in age, broken by a nearby volcanic dome, a massive anticline. I was carved by the Grand Canyon: my throat burned, etched by my own acids, a volcanic intrusion. I feared sleep, the way that I fear sleep when I've drunken too much; fiercely, terrified. If I slept, I'd be the stone and not the man. Ancient tides washed over me, I was burried in sand; the coconino sandstone was burying me. I slept.

Some people pay good money for trips like that. I'm okay now. I'm a bit sore from all the shaking I did, but the madness is gone.

1. Schizophrenia as in being of two minds about something, not as in the actual clinical condition.