Locked, loaded, and strapped

The shops were shut. He sat on a cement ledge, leaning against the downed shutter of a pharmacy. The green cross emblazoned on a pasty white background isn’t easy to forget. The paint was thin, and the strokes uneven.

He seemed quiet, lost in thought, his eyes fixed to the ground. I watched in silence and noticed a column of ants trickling through the cracks in the tar. He was watching them bump against each other, and then moving on swiftly. We smoked our cigarettes, and the silence grew ever louder between us.

We had been friends for the majority of our formative years, and I believed that I was the only one he let his guard down around. His only friend. He was different from all the others, in ways I could not fully comprehend nor describe. He did funny things, said funny things.

We grew older but remained friends. I learned more about why he was how he was. A man at a psychological disadvantage when it came to the world. I saw him weep and break down when the world got too difficult for him to understand and I saw him lose his mind to things that shouldn’t have mattered. He told me he heard voices and saw things. I remember the friends he had. He never spoke to them when I was around, but he spoke of them. So much so that I knew who was irritable, who made him happy, and the one voice that never failed to bring him down.

We grew apart in college. I went to an engineering school that was like any other while he went to outdo his peers at a college I would’ve been lucky to have attended.

The last time I saw him, he said he’d been getting better. They had him on meds that stopped the voices. They numbed him to the real world so he wouldn’t need to understand it, letting him live in a whitewashed world with his mind casting only the faintest shadow on the world that escaped him. He always wandered alone, his eccentricities a wonder to an audience of none. I heard he lives alone, in a house too big for one man.

Nobody should have to be alone, even if the only friends you have are the voices you hear in your head, even if they’re the people that dart about just within the periphery of your vision.

It might be a horrible thing to say, but I hope he’s not alone.