I’ve gotten a few anonymous messages asking me about who I love and what have you, but I’m not going to answer because these feelings and thoughts I have belong to me and I would feel robbed of their meaning the moment I allow my feelings to belong to another. The world can read my thoughts but I’ll keep the names to myself.

She remembers something but that was never enough for us.

There is no real glory in institutionalization; there’s no grand dramatic accomplishment from being locked up in a room smaller than a prison cell (although the bed is nicer.) One doesn’t learn anything from the other patients that they couldn’t pick up from a few minutes next to the homeless guy who offers to sing an out-of-key tune for a quarter. There is no depressive reality to be exposed and you can find better meals in the dumpster behind that bagel joint down the street.

Upon my induction, I found myself in a non-offensively painted room with non-offensive magazines wearing non-offensive, mandatory scrubs. I was driven to this madness of mine from an intense and despairing loneliness and yet I only had a few minutes of human contact each day.

On Mondays we had group therapy. This is the only time I was aware of the other patients apart from the occasional nighttime shrieking. The helpless, the truly insane, earnestly bought into the meaningless self-help bullshit the doctors claimed would help us, but the rest of us knew the truth. We knew there was no saving us.

We were the lost, the forgotten, the hopefully hopeless, the optimistically miserable. We knew that this life was reserved for people like us and we filled our roles beautifully. There were no breathing techniques to soothe us, no amount of writing in diaries could make our worries diminish. The world needed people like us to remind them that there were more sides to the coin. People need to see the bandages on our wrists, the scars on our necks and the looks in our eyes.

We were considered hopeful by the doctors on account we haven’t lost all touch with reality yet. We were able to function in society and that is what mattered the most on paper. We could fool the nurses and doctors into thinking we were no longer at risk during our three minute exposures to the staff. Soon enough, I lied my way out of my beige cell and back onto the streets, pretending to be proud of the time I spent in the loony bin.

Our relationship was filled with enough pain that I fear no words of mine could take those memories out of the past and give them life again. 

Maybe someday I will try again but, for now I am trying to find comfort in solitude. 

A friend lost a long battle with a bad heart the other night. He was one of those truly good-hearted people who was there for everyone he knew. I can only hope that he now rests in a place that knows no suffering.

They say bad things happen to good people and his example affirms the adage. I’ve always hoped that bad things happen to bad people and the universe operates with a sense of justice. Another part of me is thankful for the karmic imbalance because surely I would be dead if I received what was deserved. It could be argued that the heartaches and misery I have faced is evidence of bad things happening to a good person yet I feel deep down I am not good. I fear any shred of compassion I have is just to fool the forces that judge my actions. 

Someday the truth will be revealed but until then I will have to hope (for my sake and the rest of mankind) that the universe is merely random and I am neither doomed for death nor glory. 

I loved a girl once. 

I’ve moved from that home and created another since my time with her. I don’t even have the same bed I shared with her yet, some days I wake feeling as if nothing ever changed. I think she will be there when I turn over and the sun will still be peeking through the window, highlighting her red hair. 

I could feel a change in my bones when I was with her; my love for her was deeply rooted and at times painful. Happily, I let that love eat away at me until the vessel that is my body lay in ruins. 

I created a world for us in my own head, one that words failed to describe. I saw our entire lives together, from the beginning till the end of our days. In my world for us, I saw the large farmhouse we would come to live in, tucked away in a valley along the Appalachians. I foresaw our love manifest in a child, followed by others. I could see the metal basin on the porch we would bathe our babes in during the warm days of summer. I saw every time we held hands, every time we kissed and every time we lay naked upon the grass. 

The life I created for us remains concealed in my mind, but her once vivid existence has turned into a mere silhouette now. When I meet someone new I try to match their outlines but my imaginary future is stuck with an opening only for her. 

Perhaps my thoughts of her will occur less frequently and maybe I’ll find a new lover but, until then I’ll continue to hold onto my memories of our time together and the memories of things that never happened and now never will.