Prologue
I was sane once.
Sane?
Sane seems like such a clean and tidy word, wrapping my whole mind and body in a thick blanket of normalcy which no longer seems possible.
But I was normal once, just as I was once sane. That sanity was gone now, though. As gone as my wife and child. As gone as everything normal.
That word kept ringing in the emptiness of my skull. Sane. Was I sane? It was a fair question, but it stirred an even deeper question. If I wasn’t sane, what was I?
Crazy?
That word was even tidier than the other choice, but just as incorrect. If I was crazy, would I know that I’d driven my mental bus past the right exit? If I was crazy, would I feel the loss of my sanity just as I felt the loss of my family?
No, I wasn’t crazy any more than I was sane. My brain bus was just stuck in neutral, unable to shift into drive or reverse—forever stuck on the psychological highway without the ability to simply unbuckle and step away from the bony cage that surrounded it.
These wandering thoughts and images were all that was left to my mind now. They were the wisps of imaginary smoke trailing from the ethereal crack pipe of reality and, no matter how hard I swatted for those hazy tendrils, they simply evaded my mind and left me grasping at the nothingness before me.
Nothingness. That was a better word for what I was left with—the emptiness of my soul as it lay trapped between sanity and insanity. Everything that I once knew and loved was gone now—my child, wife, job, apartment, life, mind—all gone like a screwdriver in the junk drawer.
But that left only me in this great mental wasteland; unable to form complete and rational thoughts, yet just as unable to completely bend to the comforting quilt of insanity.
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