We all of us made it through tough years. Many of those years fell between the first blue-haired crush and the third suit. If you're lucky life makes your head spin. All this was made available to me: a forgetful number of somber visits to secure facilities in wooded neighborhoods to comfort friends in locked rooms. An experience... Hasn't something similar happened to us all?
America is wide. In each of the thousands of old brick buildings' locked wings on third floors there's a bulletin board somewhere in the hall. on the boards are many flyers. In washed out pastel colors they offer advice, give information, and request attention from a category of people defined by the phrase: 'hearing voices, seeing things'.
I hear voices and see things quite a bit. All day at work, voices. Relatively few command me to do things, but when it happens that they make demands I am afraid to not so do. Right now I see a commuter. She is sitting on a pull-down bench across the vestibule of the double decker 8:20 local out of South Station. Dressed all in black. Long black coat, black ear muffs, and black briefcase. Looks tired. Sits uncomfortably straight. Her face is lined, gray, and flat. Colorless eyes stare straight over my left shoulder. At what? She is clearly hearing stuff, seeing something. Voices or not, i can't speak to. She detrains woodenly into the darkness at Somewhere Hills.
I commute every day. To work. I haven't visited anyone locked away in years.