She called to tell you she cut off her own finger. No explanation, no hint of panic. It was said so matter-of-factly that you didn’t bother to question it. You knew she’d been strange for a while now.

You felt the same strangeness creeping up on you, too.

You drank more, slept less. Laughed more, felt less.

It happened in the summer, but took time to set in. Maybe if you’d escaped earlier, things would have been okay. But those feelings sat for too long and it all turned bitter like the cup of tea you let over-steep last week. Who would have thought something called Passion could taste so harsh?

You knew it went too far when you turned twenty-one. Your father cut you out of the world and placed you in your own private existence. From your blue bubble, you transcended the rules of normality. You were becoming less like a person and more like a self-contained black hole, swallowing your own humanity.

You breeched the confines of this life, floating above it in your elite blue bubble, a product of love, death, safety, and rebirth. He was showing you that he never left. He existed inside of you, allowing you to exist inside of him in his physical absence.

He colored your bubble to mimic his eyes, that vivid ocean of love they captured when they hit the light. Your warm blue isolation hugged you, comforted you. But you weren’t alone. Only in the literal sense.

Others wouldn’t understand. They were stuck in normalcy. You forget what that feels like, or if you even miss it. Someday you will. You know this because she cut off her own finger. You’re just like her.

So you understood. She had her own bubble, designed by her own father almost thirty years ago. But did these things have an expiration date? Did he leave her? Or was that just the dark side of tasting a blessing you weren’t prepared to receive?

You wonder what color her bubble is. Was it a bubble at all? Did everyone become immersed in the same oceanic sphere that lulled you to comfort and calm with the sounds of tepid water like that white noise machine you scoffed at in Brookstone for its $90 price tag. You realize now that you can’t put a price on that feeling. You can’t recreate it either.

Hanging up the phone, you offered no advice. How could you help someone who has more experience with this than you?

You wondered how long it would be before your first episode. You knew something wasn’t right when you saw him standing there with an ice cream cone. He’d never eat that. But you didn’t care; you clung to him like a sock fresh out of the dryer. And you felt him, really felt him. Every bone in his body. Each sharp detail reminded you that he was gone even though, in that moment, he was there with your arms wrapped around him. Were you slipping away from reality, or was reality slinking away from you?

Your mother had seen him, too. You found out just the other day. He hugged her in her sleep, asking her to make a phone call she couldn’t. She didn’t listen, but she heard it. She heard it and she felt it, and that’s all that matters.

The DSM could tell you nothing. Your bible was invalidated when you entered the cocoon he made for you. Once you touch death, you can’t be diagnosed in scientific terms. Your plight can’t be named, defined, or labeled. There’s no support group. Therapy can’t assess this state of being. Medications don’t apply. She tried that and she chopped off her own finger. You don’t tamper with the divine.

So now your tea still sits there, even more bitter than before. You didn’t have the heart to remove the sodden leaves once the brew went cold. You were left knowing you had to manage this on your own. Just having that knowledge was enough to push you deeper into the strangeness that consumed her.

The worst thing is you can’t even ask what the path she walked looked like—this was a path of isolation. You share it with no one. The experience is private, lonely. You become a semi-ghost, dancing on the border of reality and surreality. Words are never enough to explain the anguish of preexposure to the afterlife.

So you knew someday you’d have to cut off your own finger and pray that it’s enough, that your finger can fall free from the bubble and you can watch a piece of you participate in conventional life until its discarded. Or better yet, it’s sewn back on thanks to a medical miracle crafted by modern technology, and you can become reconnected with earthbound living because your finger hit the floor you haven’t touched since he left and cut you out of your own life.

And you think that maybe if people did talk about these things, we’d realize everyone can understand, in some form or another. These feelings are normal. You aren’t crazy and you’re not alone. In fact, none of us are confined to the earthly boundaries we subscribe to.

But the uncertainty persists because no one will talk. You’re too scared to bring it up, just like everyone else. So you suppress it and it piles up inside like a garbage heap that no one bothered to sort through for recyclables. Among the rotting trash are things that can be set aside and redistributed for the benefit of others, but instead they get thrown out.