The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 34: November 16

Today I realized that I am not in a bad mood. I am something else. I am someone else. This happens to me as it happens to everyone. You are not you for months at a time. When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back.

In my mind my life was ending in small and big ways. I wasn’t despondent over these endings; instead I was energized by them. Because of the joke I made about three-way sex in class yesterday, I was going to lose my job, and so I must start thinking of a new career. Because I am not myself, my husband would leave me in search of a woman who more closely resembled the one he married. Because my babysitter and I parted on strange terms, and because she still has the house keys, she was going to enter the apartment at night and kill our children as we slept, so I needed to protect them. When I told my husband why I was sleeping with our children and not with him, I expected him to understand my reasoning and appreciate my prudence. Because he is an incredible human, he did.

What is interesting about these alternate states of being, however, is that they never seem crazy once exited and viewed from a more sober location. Even when I return from wherever I’ve been, I understand why, when not myself, I do what I do and believe what I believe. I consider myself highly sane and competent for exhuming the possibility that my children might be killed from the lulling blandness of everyday life. I congratulate myself for my foresight. I think: I want that person on my team. She has all the angles covered. In her brain she runs a computer program to evade dooms no one has even considered. There’s nothing she hasn’t thought of, and thought of and thought of, poor woman.