(First posted here.)

I get schizophrenia, somehow. It’s when the sounds of memories and dreams and fabricated scenarios dance around direct experience and merge, cross over, overlap. It’s hearing, tasting, smelling, seeing things that are not supposed to be in this plane of reality.

When I get these mental blips, I get not only other people’s running commentaries about how they are seeing the world but also certainties about specific points in the future that are born out of whatever course of action or inaction is made (or not made) in the present.

Let me explain.

Take where I am right now, in front of a green wrought iron gate. Nirvana lives here, or at least used to live here. She’s not here. I can’t hear her.

What I sense from this distance is this: a woman who feels she’s in her early thirties, is thinking about someone very close to her. There is sorrow in the missing, and something perilously close to pity, something she is ashamed of but will never entirely admit to anyone, least of all herself.

In the periphery of her experience she is doing the dishes, but what control she has over her mind she is devoting to this gnawing feeling of worry.

Where is she? Why isn’t she calling? Should I have seen this coming?

And the sad and amazing thing is how none of these can be seen on the face of the woman who just now is struggling to open the door.

So. Nirvana is gone. It’s time to sound the alarm.