Crazy Beautiful

They’re coming to take me away, ha ha...

I sat silently in the glass walled room, my nose buried in a book, wondering what they would do if I broke out into song. It would probably go unnoticed. I shifted uncomfortably in the vinyl chair. I’d finally done it. I’d screwed up big time. I’d finally wound up in the funny farm.

I’d swallowed about thirty pills. I told my husband, Mr. Perfect. He had just come home from work and he was tired so he went to bed. The next day he dropped me off at the ER. The emergency room doctor promptly shipped me off to the funny farm.

I rode in an ambulance and everything. I tried to check myself out but Perfect talked me into staying “for the sake of our son and our marriage.”

Now here I was, my back to the wall, surrounded by people that terrified me.
I wasn’t like them. They were dirty, scraggly, unkempt, some raving mad. I wasn’t that bad. I didn’t belong with them.

A tech called out “Smoke break!” and the inmates shuffled into the hall, leaving me alone at my corner table. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a man slapped a pack of Marlboros against the glass behind me.

He was long and lean, shaggy black hair about his face. His dark skin, high cheekbones and long nose broadcasted his Cherokee heritage. Were it not for the ragged pastel striped shirt he wore, he would look like he’d just stepped out of the pages of a history book. Maybe he did and he just traded his breech cloth and moccasins for some bad eighties clothes along the way.

I must have been staring at him blankly because he asked “Smoke?”

I shook my head no.

He was the last out the door and the tech locked the unit up behind him. One tech was left to guard me but I wouldn’t be any trouble. I just pulled a sheet of paper out of my notebook and began to write a letter to Mr.
Perfect. I promise to be good if you just let me come home...