People Are Like Snowflakes

Mr. Galaxy shuffled into the room in a fraying pair of converse sneakers with his shoulders in a slump around him. His unruly white beard was approximately the size and texture of a pedigree American Eskimo.

One of many patients in a government-run psychiatric hospital, he slumped onto one of the faded blue couches in the unit and waited for behavioral health rehabilitation to start. The couches were heavily reinforced to lessen the possibility of being thrown, flipped, or otherwise used for a defensive maneuver. The nurses in the unit buzzed around him, wearing face shields and white N-95 masks. He hears them yelling whenever they attend to a distressed patient. On the unit, someone always seems to be distressed. Human misery in the unit gives off a unique stink of psychic angst.

His world is a revolving door of new patients, nurses, doctors and therapists. The prescription pad is always being ripped: dosages titrated, lowered, or increased depending on what the doctor ate for lunch. Risperidone, Haloperidol, Lurasidone.

His eyes were covered by a considerable mop of hair. He brushed this aside whenever the talking screen beckoned to him. “People are like snowflakes,” he said. As the storm spins around him, swallowing up the others, he remains. Feet implanted on the floor, head down. “So many people coming and going. What’s the point?”