If It'd Been A Microwave....
an excerpt

"Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality."

This ... is a memoir. Actually, it's more of a pseudo-memoir, since my brain isn't memoiring quite so well these days

It's not my age that's the problem; I'm too young for most forms of senility.

No, I'm afraid I suffer from plain old garden variety insanity, the troubled sort of soul who, in olden days, would be called "sensitive" and "shy". A hundred years ago, I'd have been coddled by family and neighbors, and church people would no doubt leave baskets of goodies on the doorstep for me to snatch inside through a barely cracked door when I imagined no one was looking.

In Other Times, I'd have been an Emily Dickenson or ... well... some other famous, brilliant recluse.

But it isn't Other Times.

And I'm just me, neurotic, anxious, and prone to pulling the covers up over my head and refusing to answer the door. No one leaves me baskets of goodies, anyway. I'm not diagnosed as anything, and I'm not even on any medications. I refused them. I *like* being insane.

"It's ever-so convenient, said Alice."

The nicest thing about being insane is that people have no real expectations of you. They don't mind if you talk to yourself, they merely roll their eyes if you claim to have an infestation of fairies in your hair, and don't seem to even notice if you're having a nice chat with a minor demon over tea. It's a lovely level of freedom, truly - I've found that people are mostly overjoyed if I simply remember to crawl out of bed and squirt myself down with a few shots of Febreeze.

Insanity (especially the kind I have, the sort with voluntary amnesia) doesn't need to impede your memoir writing;. I haven't let it stop me one bit. In fact, the mental unbalance comes in handy; no one can be mad at you for what you write.

If someone DOES have the bad grace to get upset at how you've portrayed them, and confronts you with it, you can simply twirl your hair around your finger, look at them sweetly, and burst into song: "Everybody was Kung-fu fighting.... ha! HA! " At this, your disgrunted relatives will likely sigh deeply, and wander off to buy you a fresh bottle of Febreeze.

You see, when you're insane, you can, essentially, make your past up to suit yourself. No one will blame you. Turn yourself into a shining paragon of virtue, if you like, a complete and unwitting victim of your circumstance and evil relatives. You can reduce your insufferable brother-in-law (You know the one, forever bragging about his place in the Hamptoms and his black-belt in Karate) into a num-chuck wietlding hamster. (Squeak, squeak) If the threat of institutionalism doesn't frighten you, feel free to morph your entire family, AND your literary agent into the cas members of a hit rodentia musical: Hamsters in the Hamptons!

"Sing along with me now... those cats were fast as lightning... Ha! HAA!"

Ok, ok. I'll settle down.

This story isn't about rodents, martial arts, or even straitjackets -- though, to be honest, the straitjackets do seem like an interesting plot twist.

My name is Jessica Edwards McGee, and this is my story, well, mine and Sam's. And, sadly, I remember most of it, as I'm not nearly as insane as I let on sometimes (Fairy hair infestations not withstanding)