Insanity Feels Like Home Now.

I'm back home.

"Home."

What is home?

Is home where you go at the end of the day? The place where you park your car? Where you sleep? Because if so, then yes. I'm home now.

But maybe home is where you come from; where you were born and grew up. The place that formed you into the person you eventually became.

Maybe it's the place where you feel like you belong. That part of the world that continues to shape as well as reflect you. Like when you tune a guitar and you can hear the dissonant vibrations getting smaller and smaller until the sounds become indistinguishable from each other. A place that resonates with a person. That sounds like home to me.

In any case, I'm back from my trip to Oregon, my hometown, and the nightmare going on there.

I've had a really hard time dealing with everything over the past week. I haven't slept. I go back and forth between wanting to figure out what's happening there and getting frustrated when I can't find anything new. I should probably just consider myself lucky to have gotten away alive. I wish that I could just forget the past and move on.

But growing up in that town has rubbed off like a stain on my mind. Going back and *dying* there...

For starters, I see my sister now. That sentence looks insane sitting on the page. I feel insane. But I'm too tired and too scared to deny that it's true. I see her nearly every day. Sometimes, especially after more than a few drinks, we'll even talk. What's weird is that her presence seems normal now. What could be normal about seeing your dead sister's ghost walking around in your house? Though, I'm not even sure that she is a ghost. I think there's a chance that she's always been there, but I just couldn't see her.

I wish I could ask her what's going on. I wish I could ask her for help in closing whatever I opened by going back to that town. But I can't, because aside from being dead, she's just a normal four-year-old who doesn't know much.

"Marissa, where does your daddy work?"

"He makes the Monster 'Messanin' at the fac-tor-y. He makes the Monster Messanin!"

"What's Monster Medicine?"

"Um. It's a messanin."

"Do you take Monster Medicine?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"'Cause I go to sleep, and I eat the messanin!" she says, jumping on my bed.

Newport Pharmaceuticals is still around, by the way. Please don't bother them. I wrote them an email through their website to ask if they'd ever owned a factory or laboratory in Oregon near my town, and I got a response a couple days later saying that they had no records of it. The company has primarily moved to Europe though, and no longer operates near Newport Beach, California or Newport, Oregon (which, to clarify, is not the town I'm from though neither are far away).

So that's a dead end. Again. I'm not sure where to go from here.

I don't know what else to ask her, though. Like I said, most of the time she's mute. Sometimes she's here and other times she seems to disappear. Most of the time, she's sad, and I've heard her crying at night. Physically, she seems normal, except for a long scar on her head where her hair doesn't grow. It looks like I'd imagine a brain surgery scar would look like, but I'm not sure. I can touch her, but she draws away, like the contact causes her discomfort.

Two nights ago, I got back from work after dark, exhausted. I re-heated some pizza and shakily poured myself a drink, sat down and flipped through the pages of Reddit. My eyes were already heavy, and after nodding off on the couch a few times, I got up and started to clean the kitchen before going to bed.

Marissa had shown up, and I could see her pacing in the hall to my left as I faced the sink. I had turned the garbage disposal on and was spraying out the egg shells and coffee grounds from the morning down the drain when I noticed that she had stopped moving.

I finished spraying out the sink and loading the dishwasher, then looked up at her, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She was backed into the corner where the floor meets the wall, with one finger pointed straight out at something behind me.

I slowly turned and like a nightmare you wish you could wake up from, saw a man in shabby clothes standing in the doorway to the living room not six feet away from me. I have no idea how long he was there watching me. He was wet, his long hair and beard were scraggly and matted, with streaks of gray.  I froze again, not sure what to do or which way to run.

Then he flashed a smile, as if he'd been waiting to be acknowledged. I noticed that one of his eyes was pure, milky white. He anxiously pawed at his neck like someone satiating a nervous tic. "You're not supposed to be here," he said, his face sinking into a confused frown.

"Okay, whoah, if you're here to rob me... I don't have much. Take what you want and just go."

"Rob you?" he asked slowly, as if processing each word separately. "No. No, no, no, no." With each word, his eyes traced some invisible thing moving back and forth across the floor. His hand shot up to his neck again. "It's already mine. You're dead." The man backed up through the door into the dark living room and disappeared from view around the corner.

I left through the front door. On my way out, I heard him yell from the living room, "Jesus continued: There was a man who had two sons!" before I shut the door. I called the police from my cell phone, telling them what had happened. When they came to the house and searched it, they didn't find anyone, though the sliding door in the living room was left open.

Then the smelled the alcohol on my breath and began to question me. You could see the exact moment that each officer lost faith in what I'd told them.

"So tell us again what he looked like, sir."

"Like I said, he had gray hair and a beard. Maybe 40's or 50's? About the same height as me, and he had a dark raincoat on."

"A raincoat? What color was it?"

"I couldn't tell, it was all wet."

"It was wet? Is there a river or a lake around here?"

"Um... No. It was probably wet from the rain. Like he walked in from outside."

"Sir, it doesn't look like it's rained for a week here..."

They left pretty soon after that. Finally after triple-checking that I'd locked all the doors and windows, and as many drinks to calm my nerves, I laid in bed. The door opened and Marissa came in, crawling up onto the foot of my bed.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"I dunno. Some tweaker."

She laughed. "Like Tweety Bird?"

"Yeah, if Tweety Bird was a drug addict."

"Oh," she said very seriously, with feigned understanding.

God, I'm so tired. I wonder if this even makes sense anymore.

What if I really did imagine the man? From the white eye to the wet rain jacket... two sons... What if I really am losing it? Or what's worse, what if this is all real? I just don't know anymore.

What do I do now?