Had the record stopped spinning? Was that silence in the house?

I was about to stop too. All of me. All at once. Under the weight of this.

Crushed.

The woman asked if I’d taken drugs. Asked about LSD. I said no. She said someone was on their way. Did I need to sit down? I couldn’t. Did I need some water? I couldn’t complete a task so enormous as that.

Then she said something I’ll never forget. I knew she was trying to be nice, to make me smile while I waited for an ambulance to come rescue me from this truth. She said:

The mind can be a scary place. You can think anything into being.

I hung up on her. I stood, frozen, rooted, in the kitchen. I suppose I waited, but there was a side of me that didn’t remember calling at all. And her words rattled inside me, up and down, all over, YOU CAN THINK ANYTHING INTO BEING. And when the ambulance pulled up in the drive and the paramedics knocked on the door, when Mom and Dad came downstairs, confused and scared, I was on the couch again, eyes closed, nodding my head along to the record (was it on?), no longer hiding in the cockpit of my pretty hate machine, but driving it now, all over Samhattan, all over the world.

I kept my eyes closed as my parents opened the front door. I listened. I didn’t respond. Then: hands upon me. The paramedics. None as powerful as that first hand, the hot one, still upon me, that showed at the base of my neck and worked its way to my mind.

All these questions, Jolly! And so much worry! And me, short of breath, I kept saying the phrase over and over, wanting it to take root in everyone else in the room because, despite how scary it was, despite how outside myself I felt, I KNEW IT TO BE TRUE.

You can do anything you want with your life.

Mom was real scared. Dad got angry. The paramedics asked if there were any drugs in the house. Heavy ones, they said. Mom and Dad said they had some grass in their bedroom closet. Dad went to check if I’d smoked some. If I’d eaten some. But I think they knew I hadn’t. I think they saw something in my eyes that day I’ve never really seen in anybody else’s.

Perception, Patricia Maxwell from school would no doubt call it. And she’d be right. Reality is just perception, ain’t that so?

They walked me out of the house. The whole street was watching, and I heard the question asked for the first time, as a neighbor kid asked his mom:

Is she okay?

ME.

Was I?

In the ambulance they hooked me up to some monitors and talked about sedatives. I told them the ambulance was a pretty hate machine and we could drive it anywhere in the world we wanted.