Wrong Address

One of the main themes of my hallucinations was that I was back in San Francisco. That we’d moved the bookshop there. That was a regular dream when, not long after opening the shop the woman I’d been living with left me. (The worst of that being that while I wasn’t a bad guy I cannot fault her for leaving.)

My decision to quit metropolitan life was built on the assumption that I’d found love and no longer needed that kind of endowment for searching for a lover. But I didn’t want to have to go back to working for someone else. I opted to stay in Durham, NC.

My illusions about where I lived were the hardest to abolish. A nurse would ask me if I knew where I lived. I thought I did but my answer put me thousands of miles away from reality. The false mental picture of my house was burnt so deeply into my brain that even after I got out I found it difficult to correctly visualize the location and look of my home. I kept starting to believe the nightmare.