The Night Watch
Works in Progress
1974 was a bad year to go crazy.
Your plan for the day? Deliberately miss the school bus and take some pills. Mother wouldn’t miss them.
Except you, being a greedy guts, scoff down the contents of the entire bottle.
Yelling and cursing and striking out at yourself, somehow banging your head and slashing your skinny arms, before they drag you to the hospital to have your stomach pumped. Seven days in the psych ward, with no memory of how you got there. Hoping they’d adopt you.
That’s when the headaches started, so bad you’d faint from the pain.
Of course you wanted to run off and join a cult. Practise free love, worship some guru, and wait for the spacecraft to arrive. Live on a farm, barefoot and starving, in the middle of nowhere.
The doctors gave you Dexedrine instead, blew out half your mind.