“I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”

“Even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I’d be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don’t know, I guess finally I want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely.”

“This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”

“Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.”

“I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.”

“The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the domw of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture.There would be a landscape I have not seen before, unfamiliar melodic echoes, whisperings in a chaos of tongues. ”

“That is why it is necessary for you to fasten your feelings to the earth—firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon.”