A Rose in Stained Glass

I wondered if I could tell him. If I could describe my life of the past few months, the havoc the hospitalization had wreaked in everything I had known and trusted about myself—how it had shaken my whole existence. How would Peter relate to me if he knew I had, well, lost my mind?
He sensed my hesitation. “I’m real easy to talk to, you know.”
“Well,” I said, sighing, giving in, wanting to give in. “I guess the main reason I came here was to recuperate from a sort of mental breakdown I had.”
“Really. Were you hospitalized?” He asked it so matter-of-factly, I gained courage.
“Ten days.”
“Depression?”
“No. They called it an ‘atypical psychosis’.” Damn, I hated that last word. Hated saying it aloud.
“Did you get drugs?”
“Yes, horrible drugs. And way more than I needed. The reaction I had to the drugs was almost worse than the condition itself.”
Silence. Then, “I’m glad I didn’t have that problem.”
“What problem? The drugs…?”
“Yeah, they didn’t give me drugs.”
“You were hospitalized, too?” I turned and looked at him now, unbelieving. I tried to imagine this doe-eyed, sweet man in a ward sunroom, staring into nowhere.
“Yeah. Same diagnosis, too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not. Really scared the hell out of everyone I know, my family. Actually, it happened twice.”
Suddenly I was full of questions. Could this happen? Could the most awful thing that had ever happened to me have happened to someone else, too? Someone who now seemed perfectly normal, who had gone on with his life, who was not smeared and scarred and hopelessly deranged? It was too much of a coincidence.
“What kind of symptoms did you have?”
“Oh, I…I thought everything had, like, a deep meaning…just for me. I thought I was getting secret messages from people. Thought I was an alien, you know, from outer space. Seemed real at the time. Took a few days for it to pass.”
“I was dumbfounded. If I had read about this in a book—two people meeting and having the same mental problem—I would never have believed it. The coincidence had to be significant: a sort of mystical fluke to let me know that what had happened to me, and to Peter, could happen to anyone. All part of the risk of being a human being in the crazy eighties.
And it certainly put a new light on my own attitude toward myself, the shame I’d been harboring. Where had that come from? Why be ashamed of mental illness any more than physical illness? Peter seemed pretty balanced about it, even casual. Not that he was shouting it from the rooftops, but he wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed by the experience.
“Did it frighten you?” I asked.
“Yeah. But I knew it couldn’t last forever.”
“You did?” I had not known that about my experience. “You said it happened twice.”
“It did. The second time was about six months later.”
“And not since then?”
“Nope.”
“Are you afraid it might happen again?”
“Wouldn’t do me any good to sit around worryin’.”
I tightened my grip on Peter’s hand and stared up at the sky through the green mist of pines. The air had cooled; nearby, people were folding up chairs and shaking out towels. Where had the afternoon gone?
Peter pulled on my hand, rocking our hammocks gently. “Want to go get high?”….