Midnight Hysteria

Sometimes I wake up at midnight and roll over the bed to realise where I am. Sometimes I find her asleep, sometimes she’s gone. I start thinking of when I met her. It had been only a month since I had joined the creative department of our city newspaper, when she followed. A new joinee. As time passed, I realised that she was like me. A Hypocrite! Perhaps she understood that I understood this, and kept her distance from me. She had a particular group of friends; I mostly stayed aloof. I’d look at her when she’d be looking away and from the corner of my eye, I noticed her doing the same. Two years had we worked together, but barely exchanged personal words. Until one night.

A long time ago, I had been in severe depression, tending to paranoia. I knew the world was conspiring against me. How could it not? They had proved it to me! I remember one day waking up on a hospital bed with a doctor questioning me why I hadn’t eaten for a week. I didn’t remember that; all I remembered was being able to talk to God. I had two similar instances in the future, and since then, Dr Conner always pays me a visit at least twice a week. He asks about my daily life, the people I meet, the things I do, and reminds me to always take my medicine. Although I don’t tell him everything, my decadence has been lapsing since. I live alone.

One night I drove up the mountain with my telescope. Surprisingly, she had been sitting at my usual place. She seemed to have a keen interest in astronomy. The rest was serendipity. Behind her delicate veil of rapture, I realised, was a tempest of petite madness. She loved philosophy, she wandered around alone and she loved my company. She explained how technology and medicine had driven the world to an unnatural, bounded life. She was raw and impulsive; she was logical yet mad; she was a free bird in a caged world. I, on the other hand, was an arsenal of self-indulgence without an appropriate veil. A sold soul, working for emancipation, guided by God himself, pitying the self-loathing world blindfolded into destruction. She was all I wished to be! We were brought together to change the world I believed, all part of some holy plan.

The one thing she was concerned about was our relation to be secretive. She didn’t want me to talk about her to anyone. One day, in ecstasy, I narrated Dr Conner everything, oh and I hadn’t felt happier ever before. He told me it couldn’t be real. ‘Of course it was!’ I said to him. I realised why she didn’t want to be discussed, so I shut myself off to all that he had to say. She did not return home for at least a week, and when she did, she was different. Bantam talks replaced by skerrick pugnacities. Lively outings by dull homestays. Love, blown away by shrieks of madness and despondency.

Am I the root of all this terror and pain? Or is it Dr Conner who refused to believe in me? Or is it just years of hidden madness, slowly boiling to culmination? So many things to ponder on, whilst staring at the ceiling, drowned in my midnight hysteria; but the most important one – is she real, or just another projection of my schizophrenic mind?