December 20, 2003

Last night I didn’t go carolling for world peace with the Christmas Carolling Collective. Instead of Jingling Your Mama (to the tune of Jingle Bells) in the park, I spent some time with my friend who just got released from the psychiatric ward, the discharge note still in his pocket. He came to pick me up around 11:30 at night, and he asked me for a hug.

We got in his car and he drove nervously down slippery roads, always a bit too fast. I didn’t put my seatbelt on and I kept expecting to fly through the windshield, shards of glass in my face. Three days ago he promised the doctor that he would hurt me and himself in all sorts of vicious ways and that’s when they decided to sequester him. But since they let him out I had no reason to be concerned about my safety. I have strange ways of showing my trust, like leaving my seatbelt off in a car that’s speeding in the night.

We went to a cafe and I bought him a slice of cake and a hot chocolate. In return he let me read the diary he wrote while in the psychiatric ward. From his notes it would seem that the world is full of shattered human spirits, and that our asylums are places of weeping. His notes were full of raw descriptions of human anguish.

“You should check yourself in for at least one day,” he told me. And yes, I believe part of me belongs in the mad house, and that all institutions offer glimpses of our own insanity.

My friend seems to have lost his appetite: he barely touched the cake and he told me that he didn’t eat real food in days. He doesn’t sleep to much either and he seems tired, or disillusioned. I didn’t ask him about his libido, but if these symptoms are sufficiently persistent then his depression seems quite severe. I’m worried about him and I’m trying to convince him to seek some treatment to ease the pain away.

Later we ended up at his place watching South Park. He gave me the plastic toothbrush he received at the hospital as we parted. The toothbrush is yellow, fragile, and wonderfully simple. It has a heart engraved on the back — clearly someone put a lot of love in designing it. I decided to keep it on my dresser for a while.