It all started with a towel.
I knew the feeling very well. It was the feeling you have within dreams, when something doesn't make sense at all, so you start suspecting you're not in the waking life. The difference, this time, was that it wasn't a dream at all. It was my first blackout, and a really sober one.
I was in my father house, so it must have been seven or eight years ago. I was going to take a shower. Not many times in my childhood I was alone with my mother. Once, we went to the supermarket to buy her some tampons. We were inside the car, in the parking lot. She told me: "You don't realize, but you are a person with rituals". I didn't agree right away, but I always do what my mother says, so I took that as a part of my personality -a major one.
A few years later, I was following my pre-shower ritual, that included grabbing a towel and hanging it in the bathroom while the water got hot. That day I couldn't find my towel anywhere. I looked in my room, in my brothers' room, in the laundry room. Then, I just went into the bathroom again, hot water still running, and filling every corner of the mirrored room with steam. The blue towel was there, hanging. I knew it wasn't there before. I knew I'd taken it, but I had absolutely no memory of it.
I know, it doesn't sound so special, but imagine me, there, with the same face you pull in your dreams when you question if it's normal or not that you can fly, but in real life.
So I stood there, I started to laugh. What else could I do? It was the first sign of insanity, the one I was waiting for.
