work in progress

see title

They told me this sort of thing would happen, eventually. That if i lived past fifteen i'd be seeing things that aren't there, hearing nonexistent voices, generally losing touch with reality. They said it was an inherited disorder, that my mothers father must've had it, but since he died in the war shortly after she was conceived, they had no real warning of what to expect.
          
When it started, i was eleven, and on the edge of puberty, the great hormonal upshift that usually triggers these sorts of things. Apparently, my mother made the doctors appointment the same day she saw me sitting alone, talking to an empty chair and laughing conspiratorially. As far as i knew, my uncle Jeff had come for an unannounced visit, and was telling me dirty jokes like he always had (when mom was out of earshot).

When the docs scanned me, they found this... condition, lurking in my genes. They never gave me a name for what i have, but the best they could explain was that it would "degeneratively break down synaptic control, and cause the regulatory functions of the pineal gland to become wildly irregular", which basically boils down to hallucinations and uncontrollable emotional shifts. Not the best combination for a "productive member of society". 

            After that, i sort of stopped being a kid. It's tough to remain innocent when a big scary authority figure in a white coat runs you through a gauntlet of complex scanning machines, takes samples of your blood, spinal fluid, and brain tissue, and then coolly tells your mom you'll be dead in four years while you're still in the room. Kind of takes the fun out of kite-flying, if you know what i mean. I stopped going to school, staying home and reading the nets for everything i could find on brain function, abnormal or otherwise, trying to get a grip on what to expect...

By my thirteenth birthday i had become almost nonfunctional outside of our small house. Outside was now filled with wildly overwhelming chaos, and an inability to separate out reality from the storm. At home, i was pretty normal. Still hallucinating, but these were all known quantities; the burning eye of Set was always peering out from behind the microwave. These small regularities helped me establish a "zone" where rationality was safe to embrace, where i would always have time to work out what i was seeing. My uncle Jeff even did his part by always wearing his outrageously bright tie-dyed green shirt whenever he came by to visit. on good days, the color would cheer me up; on bad ones, it served as an easily identifiable anchor in a visual field running riot.