Alone in a House of Mirrors ~ II

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Click here for Part One.
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I rocked back and forth, holding my head. I had to keep calm.

I looked around the room.

Remember the black lady that used to clean the house? Remember that time when my money disappeared, the money I had hidden in that antique-white piece of furniture, a chest of drawers with a fold-down compartment on top where I used to hide treasures? I wonder if she took my money.

Rocking back and forth. My head in my hands. Talking to myself.

"Carol, your aren't insane. If you were crazy, you wouldn't know it."

Yes. That's it. Crazy people don't know they are crazy; they can't tell reality from fantasy.

What was real? Real to me right now?

My bed was real. The window. The roof outside the window.

The stillness in the house; I was home alone.

The daytime; it was daytime.

I wasn't crazy, not yet.

I walked out of the tiny bedroom and made my way down the narrow stairway of the old house. I took a left at the bottom of the stairs and entered the dining room. I knew it was the dining room. It was real.

I took another left and made my way through the kitchen. The brown ceramic sink to the right was real. The old portable dishwasher to the left was real. We had to roll it across the kitchen floor to the sink and hook it up to the faucet to make it work. When it was switched on, it was noisy. It was real. The small kitchen was real.

I walked into the den, the family room, the room that we called the "back porch." It had once been a screened-in porch where Mom had raised parakeets. The family room that was covered by the roof that was the roof between my bedroom window and the giant oak tree that the imaginary malefactors would climb. It was real.

I looked around the family room and found the local newspaper, "The Hickory Daily Record."

I could do this. I could look through the paper. I could read.

I turned to the "Classifieds." Maybe I could find some help there, maybe a phone number of a help line.

At the bottom of a page, framed in a black and white rectangle, I saw an advertisement. Transcendental Meditation.

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Click here to read an introduction to memoir: Journey through Memoir: Introduction
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