Insincere Sanity – Chapter 1

From my earliest memory, I saw a man in a suit standing boldly in the winter snow, staring directly into my eyes just a few feet away. I couldn’t have been more  than three years young.

Never been able to figure out whether he was a figment of my imagination or not.

Of course, most things in my world are. From day one I’m sure that figures and figments have polluted my field of vision. Twisters with glasses, pink hairy creatures, and… Unsavory things I’d rather not mention.

We grew up in a cold place, in more ways than one. When it wasn’t snow that made you numb, it was the man-made atmosphere. You could feel it no matter how young or old you were. My father was a business man. My mother was an alcoholic. They weren’t bad parents. No. In truth they weren’t parents at all. Mother would stop drinking long enough to feed me. Father got home in time for dinner and locked himself away in his office of skyscraper paper stacks. Perhaps it was comforting to him, to always be surrounded by the four walls of a cubicle-like room with no human interfacing. I’d asked him why he came home if he was just going to work once. He responded “they won’t let me sleep at work.”

But those memories are few and far between. They’re like bad sitcom episodes you only remember because they were attached to a scent or flavor. Waffles smothered in syrup. The scent of dead skunk wafting through the car as you’re driving down a country road, and lingering for almost half an hour. When something happens during these memorable hit to the senses, the memory comes to me clearly… As much as it may ruin the scent or taste for me.

Most of my free time was spent on my bright red colored stool in a corner. Mother had put it there so I could have my own chair to watch the television, but I generally sat towards the wall. My corner had exactly 42 floral orchid designs, though they didn’t always appear to me as orchids. I could see all kinds of different things, as if a whole universe resided in the wallpaper.

Seeing the deeper meaning of the things that resided on the surface was always something I specialized in. Luckily nobody who held the same interests tried to look inside me.

I’m not quite sure they’d comprehend what they saw.