It’s 5:15 am, and I’m writing this from a sofa in an Airbnb a few hundred feet from Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Cindy is asleep in the next room. I felt cold, so I slipped on the sweater that I discarded last night on the floor next to the fire. I’m writing this for you, whoever you are. As I write that I feel that I’m also writing this for me. I also know that you and I are essentially the same thing: two “me’s” feeling separate in the world.
I remember an interaction I had with three Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to my door over a decade ago. I think I’ve written about this before, but I’m going to tell the story again.
“Hello. Have you heard about this book?” one of them asked me, showing me a bible.
I wondered who wouldn’t know about the bible. This was England, home of the Church of England, headed by the Queen of England. I went to a Church of England school for Christ’s sake. “Yes, I said. I’ve read that.”
I wanted to say, “it’s about me.” I wanted to do it not only to freak them out, but also because part of me thought that perhaps I was the Second Coming. Back then, I sometimes entertained fantasies that I was special. Perhaps it was to compensate for the feeling of worthlessness I developed and carried throughout my childhood, a feeling that was being compounded by my ongoing divorce process.
