12 ... Gabriel MorrisI hung up and continued wandering in the direction of the apart-
ment, struggling to get a grip on my crumbling reality, searching my
brain for some conceivable way out of this bewildering situation.
My schizophrenic symptoms were increasing and multiplying by
the hour. I now had flashes of light bursting throughout my con-
sciousness as well as visibly in front of me. In addition to my feel-
ings of intense compression, I felt simultaneously as if my soul were
being pulled outwards in all directions, about to be mercilessly torn
apart. The sheer force of energy moving through me felt like a freight
train trying to ram its way through my soul. No matter what I did to
try and alleviate the pressure, nothing made any real difference.
As I passed by a church, I decided to sit down and rest on the front
steps, under the light of a single bulb shining overhead. In actuality, I
sat down with an acceptance that I was going to die. I felt in that mo-
ment that I was about to somehow be obliterated into nothingness by
the awesome power coursing through me and that there was nothing I
could do to stop it. Nothing I had done over the past few days had led
to any relief, and I was certain that I couldn’t handle it for much longer.
I was at the end of my rope, fully prepared at that point to let go.
I sat there staring into the darkness of the night and resigned my-
self to death. I expected it to overtake me at any moment. I wasn’t
quite sure how the final blow was going to come, but I felt certain
that it was coming. I sat helplessly on those cold stone steps for a
long while, waiting to die, part of me even willing death to hurry up
and take me.
After fifteen or twenty minutes of just sitting there, staring out at
the darkness, contemplating everything I had been through in the
last few days, I began to look back over my rather unusual life. I
pondered my childhood, romping through the forests of Northern
California with my younger brother, chopping wood with my dad,
swimming in our pond, sledding down the hill of our orchard in the
occasional blanket of snow.
I thought about the many places I had been in the course of my
travels over the past few years—all the people I’d met along the way