August 14, 2019
Somewhere around 2014, a friend of mine went mad.
That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?
I really don’t know how else to put the sensation of someone’s reality not meshing with yours. The closest I can come is the feeling of shock and betrayal that I felt the first (and only) time I experienced an earthquake.
Do you feel that your friend betrayed you?
Not intentionally.
Can betrayal be anything but?
Did the earth intend betray me? Almost certainly not. Is it even capable of such?
And yet you feel it did.
I have trust issues.
Well, yes.
I trust that some parts of the world around me are static, inert. Or that they move so slowly as to be indistinguishable from such. That’s balanced by just how much everything else moves.
This static thing suddenly became something else. A gentle side-to-side motion became a more rapid wobble, lasting perhaps ten to fifteen seconds before fading quickly to stillness once more. In that time, I’d leaped from bed and dashed into the hallway, confused. I was just in the process of calling the dogs when it stopped.
JD simply mumbled “Earthy-quake?” and fell back asleep.
Three minutes later came a small aftershock, lasting no more than five seconds.
You raced to post it on Twitter, Mastodon, and Telegram, and fill out the I-Felt-It report like a good little Millennial.
I have a type. I’ll own that.
Getting that call in 2014, hearing those words that spoke of a different reality. It was an earthquake.