When the Past Starts Acting Like Prophecy
(How Time Loses Its Neutrality)
One of the earliest casualties of psychosis is not logic.
It’s time.
In Chapter Three of Fought Disorder (“Summer Time”), language doesn’t become strange in the present tense. Instead, the past begins to behave differently.
Memory stops being memory.
It starts to mean something new.
Nothing Changes — Except What It Means
On the surface, this chapter looks like a detour.
It moves backwards:
A classroom
A friendship
A missed connection
A relationship that could have been
There is no crisis here.
No breakdown.
No distortion of reality.
And yet, linguistically, something crucial happens.
The past stops being closed.
A Short Passage
“We spent the rest of the lesson in silence.”
It’s an unremarkable sentence.
But within the broader linguistic system of Fought Disorder, it doesn’t function as description. It functions as foreshadowing.
Silence becomes charged retroactively.
What’s Happening Linguistically
This chapter introduces a third distortion:
Temporal contamination.
In ordinary cognition:
The past explains the present
Meaning flows forward
Memory is inert unless recalled
Here:
The past begins to explain itself
Meaning flows backward
Memory feels preloaded with intent
Earlier moments acquire new significance not because new information has emerged, but because interpretation has shifted.
The narrator doesn’t remember differently.
He remembers more meaningfully.
Why This Is Dangerous (And Convincing)
This kind of distortion is especially persuasive because it feels reflective.
It sounds like insight:
“That was always important.”
“I just didn’t see it at the time.”
“It makes sense now.”
And sometimes, that’s true.
But in psychosis-adjacent cognition, this process doesn’t stop. It accelerates.
Every past interaction becomes:
A sign
A missed warning
A seed
Language begins to rewrite causality.
Memory as Narrative Glue
Notice what this chapter doesn’t do.
It doesn’t argue.
It doesn’t accuse.
It doesn’t declare significance outright.
Instead, it quietly:
Aligns timelines
Juxtaposes relationships
Lets implication do the work
This is how psychosis often develops linguistically — not through rupture, but through over-coherence.
Too much sense is made.
The Reader’s Subtle Involvement
This chapter invites the reader to do something dangerous:
To look back and re-evaluate.
To feel that faint tug of:
“What if that moment mattered more than I thought?”
That instinct is human.
The book doesn’t invent it — it amplifies it.
This is how readers are gently trained to inhabit the same interpretive posture as the narrator.
Why This Chapter Matters Later
Much later in Fought Disorder, the world will feel:
Scripted
Targeted
Inevitable
When that happens, it won’t feel sudden.
Because the groundwork was laid here — when the past first stopped behaving like the past.
Psychosis doesn’t only distort perception.
It reorganises biography.
Why the Book Needs Time
This is why Fought Disorder cannot be reduced to moments or anecdotes.
Its central subject is not crisis, but accumulation:
Of meaning
Of implication
Of inevitability
The book sustains this temporal distortion long enough for the reader to feel what it’s like when your own history starts to argue with you.
