fever pitch

I get fevers sometimes. Nasty things that leave me bedridden and delirious, a whole world of terrifying things wheeling in front of me. I can feel another one coming on as I write this--they always come on slow--and it's only now that I realize I've been wrong the whole time. I don't lose touch with reality when I descend into the fever dreams. That's the only time I have any contact with it at all.

In my waking life, the world makes sense, more or less. Everything's orderly and happens for a reason, and we can study and quantify and understand it. Conversations make sense. People behave in rational ways. Nothing ever happens that makes me stop and go "what the fuck is going on?"

But that's not the real world. The real world is chaotic and confusing. Our attempts to study it and quantify it are just laughable. Nobody makes any sense--everyone's completely insane and everything is completely random and terrifying. That's what the real world is like. And that's the world I see in my fever. And I'm starting to think that's because the fever doesn't cause the delirium, but the other way around.

We need the lies to function, and when we see the truth we can't even stand up anymore.