Lately I can't read anything I haven't read before.

Because sometimes when I'm reading, the story will get really strange. I'll follow along for a while, just watching for what's going to happen next, and then it's like I snap out of it. I turn back a few pages and start reading again, and it turns out that nothing I thought I just read was really there.

I was reading Jane Eyre, and I got to this part that I never remembered reading before. The madwoman in the attic was telling me what she was thinking, and why she did what she did. She said the worst part about being crazy was that it was like dying. It froze everything into place. You couldn't get away from who you'd been, what you'd done. Nothing new could ever happen to you. That was why the lovers in Dante's Inferno whirled around in circles, tied forever to one another. That was all they were, now: a picture of their own passion. The outside and the inside were one and the same. And all she was was wanting and unwanted. She knew she shouldn't love Rochester any more -- she never should have, really -- and if she could just get her mind back for a minute, she'd be able to talk herself out of it. The heart follows the mind more often than we think, she told me. But she'd gone mad while she was still in love with him, and so now she was madly in love with him. It was humiliating.

I could have listened to her for hours, but when I looked at the page again, everything she'd said was gone. I looked through the whole book, but I couldn't find anywhere that she got to talk. I knew I must have just come up with it myself somehow, but it felt so real.

And when I tried to write down what she'd said to me, it was like trying to write about music. I knew how it made me feel, but I couldn't get it down just right so anyone else could hear it.

I guess I'm dreaming with my eyes open now.

That's okay. It's not bad, I guess. Just odd.