Letters to No One

Letter 4

Dear No One, 

I saw the psychiatrist today; they were doing parole hearings in his room so he was using one of the psychologist's offices instead. With him were two male students, it is unusual to have an all male cast; I imagine young women are more likely to sign up for this sort of thing than men are. It is certainly what I observe.

The office put me in the mind of a elementary school guidance counselor. There was a mural of a tony the tiger figure, missing his head, the paint and brush laid at his feet like an offering at a Shinto shrine. We chatted for a bit, and I gave the students some background on my life and illness and other extraneous bits. I was holding a copy of a manga a friend had loaned me, something to read while waiting to go in, so their was a brief moment of bonding over Bleach with one of the students. It always strikes me how normal these people seem to me, they are close to my age, and I could have gone to school with them if we had lived in the same area codes.

I wonder what it would be like to be in there place, to see someone like myself on the other side of the metaphorical fence. I make a point of remembering names, there is no reason for it. I like to imagine that I am making some kind of connection to the real world. At some point I started keeping a list. If I stay in this place long enough they will grow younger to me, we will no longer be of an age, and perhaps the odd sort of closeness I feel for them now will mature into a distance beyond reckoning.

The weekends have dnd in them. I've been playing Friday night, Saturday morning and evening, and one other time during the week. Sessions usually last about two hours, some of them running over or under to the dictates of schedule or convenience. I could do without any of it. There is an inherent tension and drama to the game, not the good type of drama, the whiny, needy, tantrum producing sort. This weekend wasn't a bad set of sessions as it goes, it doesn't have to be, someone threatens to quit every week. The Saturday group is better, but I've begun to consider the whole project as a waste of energy. I enjoy thinking about many aspects of the game, playing it is the problem. This is not the recruitment pool of my dreams.

Saturday afternoon I was falling asleep in my bunk so I decided to go outside. I was listening to 1989 (as you may have gathered I am a fan of TaySway), and as I stepped into the sun I felt the barest scrim of giddiness overtake me. It was bright, and a cloud cast down a wedge of shadow in the hills beyond the sparkling bladed fences. On either front of that darkness the deep green of the forest took on a haloed air, a sort of blessed mancy that imbued the whole atmosphere with previously
humbled beauty. The sky, of course, maintains its own kind of magisterial majesty, revealed only to those who want it to be there, the most ridiculous of magicks, that which has power for our belief in it. There is a lane behind the housing buildings that opens onto the yard. As I walked it I felt happy. Probably the pills.

Having written you a few times, it occurs to me that I haven't told you much about my environment. It seems boring to me, how and when we eat, what the facilities look like, the schedules of controlled movement; it is all beside the point. It will slip in here and there, when it relates to
what I'm blathering. I don't know who you might be, where, or how far, and so I send a bit of trust out with these letters, for you are in my confidence. I want to be known.

Yours,
(15-5-7)