Reflection, or Hippocampus

I think my first "episode" happened when I was about nine years old. It was New Years Eve, 1999. The world was in a frenzied uproar with the excitement of the new millennium. Predictions of an apocalyptic corporate meltdown were running rampant through the emerging world wide web, and the already apathetic teenage population had collapsed in an orgy of revelry and self-deprivation. I had only a faint understanding of the events that were whirling around me, and I held them in little regard.
However, as the clock drew closer to midnight, to the future, a painful anxiousness began to rise in my stomach. I sat on the couch, eyes glued to the TV screen, my face clenched with repressed emotion. What was going to happen when that huge, glowing ball dropped down into Times Square? Would I be different? Would the world change? What about the people I knew? How would they change? Would I be able to recognize them? The tension mounted as the minutes passed.
It was almost midnight. I remember thinking that it was dumb for me to be so worried, but the fact that I was only agitated me further. I couldn't understand where this anxiety was coming from or what it was about.
I remember the countdown. I remember my dad enthusiastically trying to wake my mother, who had fallen asleep on the couch.
And as the noise on the television grew, I imagined myself swelling like a puffer fish and popping. the tension was too much, I felt something click in my head and all of a sudden the living room door burst off it's hinges and fell flat with a thud. My parents screams were drowned out by the sudden climactic roar of the crowd as the ball dropped and an enormous hippocampus careened in through the shattered doorway. The noise was deafening, but I could still hear it neigh and grunt as it flung itself about the room, slapping it's fish tail against the pictures hanging on the wall and crushing the coffee table with it's hooves. Because it's rear was that of a fish, the horse creature only had two front legs to stand on. It was clumsy and awkward, and it flapped about the room in a terrified frenzy, unable to control it's twisted body. My parents compressed into the couch in fear and the TV thundered with the debauchery of the celebration in Times Square.
I remained immobile, baffled, petrified, until the animal's enormous, slimy fish tail whirled around and slapped me into blissful unconsciousness.