I only know it has started after it’s over 

when the maelstrom of thoughts floods back in

the where am I’s, the who are you’s, the who am I’s. 

I wonder if I take it too seriously, if it’s all a universal experience navigated by pain tolerance or whatever it is that helps others bury it down. 

Spinning walls and melting faces and muffled sounds followed by being blinded while still seeing. Every inch of my existence can be doubted in just a split second yet the feeling leaves an imprint for hours. 

Limited words can explain it but if feelings could speak to you they would tell you everything about this glitch in reality, rift in my brain, limbs moving slowly. 

I am moving through water and I do not exist. A numbed knife has sliced open thoughts and they no longer correlate. I have never been real, and neither has anything else I have ever known.  

Then just like it started, it ends— abruptly, a rock of the ship, the tide running back to the sea. There is a small aftermath: a buzz in my mind, confused eyes, I am back in the world. Things are real again, aren’t they? 

I can never tell.