I still remember the moment…I had just turned 23 and I was in the kitchen chopping carrots for my pot of vegetarian chili.  The smells were heavenly.  I could see my black cat, Puppy, batting at flies through the screen in her window seat.  Aaahh, the end of summer…now trying to be fall…dust motes twirling in privately guided whirlwinds…the clink of ice cubes in my tea.  

…and then a rapping at my door.

I descended the stairs to open it.  And that’s when the wrongness came in.  I was blinded by a tsunami of sunlight, and there! --a silhouette where a person should’ve been.  The silhouette held a piece of mail in his outstretched hand, “this is yours.”  I opened my mouth to answer him, but found I could not speak.  Alphabetical fragments hovered around me, but the threads that connected them to sound had all been cut, and so there I stood: surrounded by untethered letters and miles of thread.  I pushed wind past my vocal cords and noise emerged but there was no structure to my utterance, no “something” created by the movement of my lips-tongue-teeth…I felt my head splitting, and a weird electric crackle as the shrinking and expanding of mysterious knobs of tissue in my brain manufactured a sparkle of halos within glittering halos.  And then the sickening dizziness and everything went into blackness.> READ MORE