[mindless1]

It is too difficult to describe schizophrenia. One has to have walked those miles in someone's shoes before they can truly understand the depth of this Western illness. Modern science has failed (and will) time and time again to describe the loss of contact, the parallelization between thoughts, the language gaps, the identity crises that can accompany a delusional state. But, people are afraid of it. They are afraid because they do not see the inner beauty, the illuminating shining truth reflected in the mad souls of our generation.


The mind's wisdom, free will, or poverty? Existential crisis. Overlapping synchronicity. Where is God? Where is the woman dressed in robes, swirling with the colors of a forest's song? Earth. Mother Nature. Gaea. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I heading? Why?

I was fourteen when the world lost all color. The electricity in my brain, beyond space...into a world beyond the eye's imagination. Into a place where dreams had the ability to become reality. Tortured back to perfection, the voices in my head screamed “you're an animal now.”
Voices that only came after endless seconds turned into torturous infinities of isolation. I waited, in my dark cell, I waited to be let out. To be released for my crimes. I waited for sanity. Sanity did not arrive in the bottle of pills I had been assigned. The secret fix to assail my broken mind, hours after the machines measured my heartbeat.

I sat with the toddlers because the adults told me I wasn't like the other teenagers there. I was catatonic because they put me on a plethora of medications, and to fix what? My suicide attempt? It wasn't the medication, the anti-psychotic that caused fear to rip through my insides as I tried to run the car off the road and be free forever of this madness.
I try to remember a life of sanity before schizophrenia. I was two, standing in Giant Eagle staring at a white frosted birthday cake with choo choo trains on it and a big number. Number 3. I felt exquisite, oh to be older. There were balloons on the cake. Red. Green. Yellow. To be tall enough to touch things I wanted to touch, and be in charge at last of my world. And I was bright, I won't lie. I scared people and some were in awe, of my bright blue eyes and intellectual capacity. I can remember as far as infancy, possibly. But those memories are more of the depth of bright colors, thoughts and constant introspection.

My dad took me everywhere around the city in a blue strap on backpack. He took me to a large graveyard, and I remember the big stones and the awe and peace I felt...actually, give me a trigger and I probably remember everything about anything. At seven I had the kind of poetic depth of a writer and I was melancholy with bursts of blissful awe in experiencing the world. Maybe autistic wouldn't be the right word. I soaked up everything, turned thoughts and ideas around constantly. I loved museums and plants and stars and God.

In a coffee shop down the street from my family's house, I'm in a stroller and the adults laugh and smile at what a pretty baby. Little did they know, I would remember. I do not forget things. In fact memories are more than non-physical, they can never truly wiped out. That's because, God has a mind too. I loved my mother. My mother with her passionate ideas and constant beaming compassion for her children.

Whose suicide attempts still perplex me, and by this I mean. I sometimes wonder if they even really happened. I never saw the attempts, I never saw anything but bottles of pills, and then her leaving to go to a hospital where bad things happened and her coming back, and being better, and then...years later it returning. The mania. The bipolar or whatever. I think I got the disease just from watching her the battle, the constant rage and fury held inside, at doctors, at war, at everything wrong in the world.

She was a peace activist, a strong influence too. She was one of the 16 that crossed the line at Fort Benning, Georgia. Mom even flew to Palestine, to teach peace and conflict resolution to children. She was a teacher. When the local school asked for an explanation to the FBI interrogation when she was twenty-one, she threw her hands in the air.
Said if they didn't understand, then it wasn't worth it teaching at their school. Some people have insinuated that she might have been drugged or something to end up like she is now...maybe in jail, who knows? I certainly don't. But I know what I've seen. No one can prove something someone cannot see or wants to see. They have to be ready. The world is not ready to see what I can see. I've blinded myself for their sake. So now time is as timeless as it is meaningless.

Those voices beckoned her to shrill loudly, chaotically, beneath the evanescent sky. Voices, the taunting voices wearing strange identities and with a new persona for every day of the year. Her madness was unmatchable to the stars who poked their eyes lifelessly out every night, to see what the world was up to. Maybe Jesus Christ himself heard voices, or maybe he could heal her of them—someday, one day. He'd dip her into that holy water and absolve her of the sins that left her selfless, selfish, confusing. She'd crumble into his arms.

The man of the household kicked the dog, he has just been promoted and now goes to work three times a week instead of one. He had no time to address his cancer, or the dog, or the woman with the cast watching videotapes and dreaming of other lives. Now and then she would stop, and then she'd speak in hisses and whispers. This was not always my mother. Once, not that long ago, she fought against war and its assassins. She did her time in Muscogee jail, barred in between white cells with barely any bedding or food.

They taunted her, the guards, and shook her freedom away. She came home, glowing, but tired. She never protested war again. She felt it was useless, like she hadn't been heard. Now she speaks to ghosts who listen in third person to the woman she longed to become.
I have also heard voices once or twice before. It happened with the car accident, that I already knew a strange man was in a coma. I heard him, dying. Well, it was true after all. And the first time, they were there screaming at the world to let her out, or me, between the confines of a brick trap door hospital, where they sanitized me of sanity, and stripped me of my reason. I was there for fighting with them, and breaking a cup. When I was there had pushed the trap doors and told them all I was well, before they diagnosed this as an episode of defiance, of madness, of denial and freaking out.

The doors were all glass, the windows made you invisible. But the mirrors were for the important doctors to see all of you, no matter what disease you had. They would peer in, and justify their malady of panaceas that would never cure you, only dull your senses unto perfect, justifiable behavior.
And the doctor, who wouldn't cure your failing memories, only correct your errors of perception. But they haven't killed the memories, for I wrote the truth on the wall of justice. I am sane, after-all, only living in a deteriorating schizophrenic world. One of my own design, though by force. It's a world I can retreat to, now, that I am safe. One where dreams are reality, but reality isn't really even there. One with cotton candy clouds and a premonitions that come true too often to keep dreaming.

White blood cells, anemia, dementia, lost dogs lost minds lost friends. A pattern in the sky. A voice whispering on the wind, a colorful picture book that is too bright to call anything. I am schizophrenic. I am schizophrenic. I am a schizophrenic. I dull my hues to a perfect combination of blue and purple and yellow. I refrain from remembering, I stop myself from questioning, from asking anything. And I cry silently for the abused animal I have become. You will never know the true me, she's hidden beneath layers of darkness.

I remember her how she was once before this madness, she was full of bright-eyed sunlight and open to things that no one else was aware of. As a child I colored rainbows that laughed and together we vanished into the horizon.

She hands me a tearful letter, "You are my sunshine, my schizophrenic sunshine,”