windows to the world

So Karen is one of my favorite people, not that I know her really well but just because she charms me so. Because she is an artist and she has a pretty laugh and we have the same exact size feet so when I try on these certain sandals she wears ALL THE TIME, she wears them so much that they have grooves in them from her footprints, and when I try them on my feet slip into them exactly perfect like they were made for MY feet which seems really awesome somehow. Every time she wears those shoes around me I make her take them off and let me try them on. And somehow it makes me like her more, that we have the same size feet and I fit in her sandals. I like to look at all of her art, and the fun things she always buys for herself to decorate her room, and she has all of these weird colorful clothes that she lets me dress up in and model for her. And she lets me wear them around the house. And we can talk closely about ourselves with one another without fear. But right now she is in the mental hospital because she just had another episode of insanity. I don't really want to talk about her brand of craziness. She just calls it being in a "fog". We'll leave it at that.

Scott and I went to visit her last week. She was happy to see us. I was looking at all of the deranged people everywhere. Wondering why they were all there. The place had art by the crazy people, on the walls in the hallways. Drawings and paintings. Some of them had words written on them. I saw a drawing of a tree stump with the phrase I STAND ALONE written in huge neatly printed capital letters underneath it. I saw a painting of a girl's face done in random colors, with light on one side of her face and shadows on the other and she seemed melancholy. I saw a painting of just a pair of eyes, glowing. I saw a drawing of somebody wiping tears from their face, crying puddles onto the floor, and there was a caption written underneath in pencil which said,

"My tears are blood
like when I feel
like cutting myself."

While I was in the hallway, Karen and Scott were talking alone, and I was out there myself. And this guy who seemed to be somewhere in his late twenties, he had golden-dark skin and a chubby physique and a huge mess of floppy dark brown hair that almost looked like an afro it was so curly, he was pacing back and forth through the hall, talking to himself. I heard him say,
"It belongs to me." And I caught his gaze as he passed me by. We smiled just to be friendly. I turned away from him and stared at the painting of the glowing eyes. But then he spoke to me.

"This is a good one," he said. And he pointed at a painting of a man's face, a man with a square jaw and a goatee, and full slightly parted lips that seemed like they were almost ready to tell something. His forehead had a door in the middle of it, a red open door. There was a roof over his head, instead of hair he had a roof over his head. With a chimney top coming out of it, smoking. There were clouds behind him and the sun was shining bright and he had no shoulders, his head was just planted on a grassy ground like his face was really house planted in the earth. When Karen admired it later with me she remarked, "It's like his home is in his head." The caption underneath stated,

"Depressed over
not having
a home."

He had on square, thickly framed black glasses. The guy who'd been talking to himself in the hallway, he told me those glasses were windows. Windows to the world. He said other things about the painting that I can't remember clearly. He was trying to tell me what it meant to him. I wanted to understand everything he said but I couldn't grasp the logic and then he was gone. I could barely speak and he walked away muttering to himself again. I saw him later when I went back to be with Scott and Karen. He was in the room with them, watching the television that was up on the wall tuned into the history channel. I noticed he didn't have any shoelaces on his sneakers. They don't let the patients have shoelaces because they can be used as weapons. Karen said she arrived there wearing a watch but they wouldn't let her keep it on because she might get angry, rip it off, and throw it at somebody's face. Anyway when Scott and I left I hugged Karen goodbye and I waved to the guy as I walked away. He waved back and looked at me curiously.

I kept the stickers that they gave Scott and I, that we wore to show we were visitors. They're stuck on the wall in my closet. I like to see them when I'm picking out my clothes. It makes me think about how interesting the mental hospital was.