I keep wincing just before I think I’ll knock it over, but then I don’t even move a muscle. I can see the whole affair in my head—whatever it was to go flying: glass, wrist, anything delicate— I just know I will knock it over; it doesn’t matter what it was. Maybe like a long time ago, I will look at my lap and start crying. Only I’m sure that this time there will be no parents to tell me not to cry about entropy. I will be six again, in a large green colonial four bedroom house, but all alone. I won’t have paid the electric bill in months and so the place will be still and dark for dinner.

Often when I believe this is about to happen, the colors of the strange awesome things I used to dream knock loudly on the front door of my apartment. They fill the peephole like out a submarine I’m peering and when I least expect it. That is, they always show up when I am about to knock something over, but I never know when that feeling will come over me. The colors are such a nuisance; I try to keep them from coming. But sometimes I can’t help but think about a small child alone in a large, dark house and then I think that the child will surely spill something and not know how to clean it up, or even know that it doesn’t matter.

And if you know that nothing ever spilt never matters, then why wash the bedclothes? I think. Surely all that is unkempt of the bed has come from you. Skin. Sweat. Fluid. Visions. I keep washing gray sheets and piling them on the bed. I always need more. Bloodshot eyes that don’t close stare at the dark whitewashed ceiling under the pressure of one hundred pounds—sheets so thick they soak the nightsweat up like a sponge. That is often when the toys rattle—when their toy eyes glow bright colors and blink like fireflies in the room and move all about.

I hate never sleeping and yet I can’t stand to just close my eyes.

I beg for the world to make it easy. I ask if it would be okay if I weren’t crazy, but I know that the piercing eye of the world, the Sun, sooner or later will part the blinds and firmly say, “No.” (Just between you and me, I think the Sun is a jerk—he never gives a shit about my plight–just keeps coming around to check on me and then taking off for the next appointment. Mark my words, modern men have no friend in the Sun.)

The only thing I like about the visit from the Sun is that the colors no longer barricade the door. They get bored pretty easy. Then I can leave. I wear 3 pairs of colored sunglasses that blend out all the color. Some people don’t like it, but frankly I like to see in gray. Mostly I don’t look anyway.

Read the whole thread: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept