Deemed Insane

At the edge of a cliff I sat, inhaling the beauty around. The sharp smell of pine trees , of damp soil, of blossoming dandelions revived my weary senses.  I looked up at the starry night. I needed no glasses to see the stars. Their light reaches the eyes of all but the blind, and I know every constellation by heart. I came from them, in the end. How can you not recall the name of your parents?

The breeze bought a shiver to my naked body, but I wasn’t going to put any clothes on. I had none after all. I had left them at the foot of the ward’s fence. I wanted nothing to do with those men.

I was put in a psych ward, deemed insane by mad men. I was draped in a light blue gown, strapped to a bed. A transparent orange bottle with a white cap stood on the table at my side. Filled with light red capsules, “Lithium,” it read.

“She’s lost her mind,” men in white cloaks whispered among themselves.

But no I did not believe that. I would never lose my mind, I cherished it too well. Besides, the voices, they’ve quieted down, but they haven’t left. They’re still here. I still talk to them all the time. Every single one. They would leave with my mind if it had left. They hate me, I know.

But they’re the only ones I talk to, the only ones whose questions I answer and whose answers I accept.  They asked me why we were here as I lay on that bed.

“I don’t know. They say they’re waiting for my mind. They’ve called me insane. Yet what is insanity?

Is it just a derangement of the mind? But wait that would affirm that my mind hasn’t gone, and that’s not what was said.

Is it losing all sense? No, I could see and hear well.

 Common sense, maybe? That is possible, I confess.

 Is it living in an illusion? Or becoming delusional?

 Is it talking with ants? Conversing with pets?

Or was I viewed insane for those thoughts in my head? Not the ones that walked on sidewalks but the rebels that leapt, and danced in meadows, then crashed and wept. The ones that took the wrong step, and continued with the wrong dance, twirled in an incorrect direction, started a renaissance.

Maybe they thought that’s where my mind had gone, to that green meadow to bring them back again. So they locked me in this white room, with fluorescent lights overhead, and waited at the door of my house with cuffs and guns loaded with lead.

They refused a rebirth, debunked its need. They would dissect it, kill it, watch it bleed.”