Concerto of prisoners

Musical paper

The symphony of recluses

Their days are set like musical paper.  There are hours for meals, for getting up, for going to bed, for cigarettes, for medicines.  Eight o'clock is the waking up time.  Early in the morning, but a little too late not to let it appear that they are no longer active.  At least, not a recognized activity, outside.

Breakfast arrives, sober and reassuring.  After dark, a veritable interior theater where their death instincts fight a war against what remains of their living will, it is there that they find the fellow travelers of their strange adventure.  Returned, in a heard silence, among their peers, the night seems a little less harsh to them and is finally blurred by the hand of the day.

Then the activities begin.  Therapy, especially through art, to learn to express the inexpressible.  The suicide of a brother.  The death of a father.  The caresses, too long, too pushed, of a disturbed uncle.  Some are simply afflicted with an almost metaphysical melancholy, an exacerbated romanticism specific to their age.  Everyone has taken with them, in this bizarre colony, their knot of suffering, their internal abyss, their inexorable lack.

After having, over the course of the day, crossed the maze of their own intimate which is reflected in the eyes of their mates, they return, alone, at night, to their respective rooms.  Often in these young people there is something broken, torn by the cruel hand of others.  And an immense latent violence towards oneself, likely to burst one day or the other.

Doctors in this area of ​​juvenile psychiatry know this all too well.  They have learned, over the course of the sessions with their patients, to hear with a very specific distance what cannot be said.  But can they really understand it?

Deceived by their science, they find it difficult to grasp the true depths: that, Tanguy is convinced.  When he learned that he was to join what he would later call "the sad people bubble," he accepted his fate with a certain philosophy.  Without expecting anything, he signed the admission contract.  His mother had insisted on accompanying him to the institute.  His father had long since left them.

In the passenger seat of the car which had gradually moved him away from his home, Tanguy had remained impassive, hypnotized by the intermittent eddies of the swaying vehicle.  He wanted to reassure his mother, tell her that everything would be fine.  But the words sounded too wrong.  Silence had stretched on the road to the unknown.