what's that word for?

what's that word for when you remember and old affair and you can't distinguish between fantasy and reality?

karl gave me this book for christmas called "the powerbook" by jeanette winterson. it's a breezy read so i finished it already, and he lent me another winterson book called "written on the body."

anyway, i was trying to figure out this thing - why i liked the book and yet felt slightly uncomfortable about it. of course i enjoyed the book because it was sexy, first and foremost. that's the most obvious. it's also very spaciously written. it looks spacious, it feels spacious when you read it. short sentences, paragraphs, chapters. bare pages. thoughtful but doesn't ramble. has theories but not too cerebral and thought-out.

then there's not being able to understand what really happened. it was designed to blur the lines between the real and imagined, and at first i didn't really like that. it's ingenious and all, but i wanna know what happened. it didn't sit with me right that i came away from a book with no clear sense of its plot, even if it did quite effectively explain a thing or two about love.

so i decide to read "written on the body" while her style is fresh in my memory. a little over a page into the book and i suddenly remember this conversation anne and i had.

you know how you daydream about an affair as it's happening? you know how you fantasize about a happy moments? being the enviable couple? or a tragic ending where everyone will think that you never did anything wrong and he was always the selfish one, the one who was abusive or neglectful? and then that scene where he'd grovel because he'd realize he was wrong? or he'd see you as your most fabulous self happily single or happily hitched and he'd regret you ever parted ways? and you play it over and over again because it helps you sleep at night. *yeah, whatever makes you happy. whatever makes it beautiful. whatever makes you insecure. whatever leaves you satisfied. whatever ceases to break you down.. some of the time.*

the thing is, years after, you'll look back and you can't even figure out what really happened and what was all in your head. fantasy and reality are too difficult to tell apart. (it makes talking to or about an old lover difficult because you might slip in something that never really happened). it turns out that that was exactly was winterson was doing in her novels. and it didn't sit with me right because anne and i always wanted to try to remember things right so we wouldn't run into trouble talking about it.

but i guess once those two worlds meld, there's no undoing it. so winterson, as karl said, "explores that mental territory where the real and the could'ves and should'ves are all blurred into one narrative/narrator." or something like that.

what's the word for that?

there IS no word for that. hm.