Some afternoons, I think I’m a stranger.

Yes, it’s usually afternoon when the mood strikes. It’s when I walk slowly. My feet won’t follow familiar paths, and so I go places I’ve never set foot before. And my horizons widen.

I find new places where the crests of horizon-bearing hills hide all houses from view, and all I can see, no matter how many times I turn in a circle, are my unknown dreams in the flat gray of the endless sky.

I saw a painting once, where there were two stripes of color—one was red, on a black background, and the other was orange, on a blue-gray background. On closer examination, it turned out that they—the orange and red—were really the same color. An optical illusion of identity.

It’s the same for me. When I stood a place I had never stood before and realized that from that hill you could see the mountain, turning peach on its summit (though the rest of the world was soft and gray), the contrast changed me into a stranger, and I stood there, far from familiarity and therefore far from self. I didn’t know the body I inhabited and the mind I used, I didn’t know the common thoughts that recourse through my synapses moment after moment, I didn’t know my usual voice, I didn’t recognize my hands, or my gait, or the familiar feelings.

And feeling separated, I felt whole.

Just now, I see the view out my window as from a castle tower. The sky is its familiar wall, and all things recede into the cloudless, obscure distance. All things. All.

I am a stranger in my mind. I am an eye, settling on familiar things and finding them unfamiliar. It is a parallel universe.

From turning a room inside-out, it is a small step to turning the world inside out. But the illusion is hard to hold onto. I learned it at an early age. The lesson will never desert me. But I do not speak of specifics for fear that the skill will leave me forever. I stumbled on it by accident, and I will not lose it the same way.

The trees are lovely shades of green, and the roof sticks an edge into my vision of eternity. When the grass recedes toward the earth like a green ocean at low-tide, I will again lay on my back and gaze, enchanted, on endlessness.

I have been enchanted. I have been enticed, seduced, enraptured, and captured. Fate induced me to tickle eternity, and when eternity laughed, the sound sent me mad, and I do not wish to return from the Land of Madness and nevermore stare, wide-eyed, at its sparkling magnificence, dull as a slab of slate and scintillating at the body of a dragonfly.

My fingers move without my command, my ears hear the sounds of earth and scorn them. I can sit still and see the places that I know exist beyond these four violet walls. Beyond drywall and studs and siding is a world of endless, hilly fields.

No, I cannot take you there. I will not. It is mine, it is sacred, and its bones do not speak to you. Accept it you may, but have it you shan’t.

If you built a house on my fields I shall cry until I drive you as mad as myself.

Bury me there. In my fields, on my hills. Let me decay and become part of the grass. Let some other poor stranger to herself lie on her back above my grave, when I have asked to be dumped unceremoniously, in a shroud, with no hard coffin to shield me from the grave of man. Let her stare at the gray sky while the green grass tickles her mind and let her hear me whisper in the breezes: “Let no man drive you mad. Let the earth bring you its own unreasonable sanity.”

The mood is slipping away. The words leave my mind, the worlds leave my sight. Leave me be, or leave me never.