Certainly I don’t feel any more or any less than anyone I know. Yes, I have to constantly remind myself that everyone around me is fighting the same hard battle because my life has been like Kingda Ka. Up and hard down. Way up. Hard down.

Certainly I am not the strangest person I know nor do I feel that I have had the hardest life (though, apart from my mother, I can’t say that about almost anyone else I’ve known well). Perhaps it’s because I see more than those around me, that I am more emotionally aware, that I feel like a stranger looking into a big room. What does that room look like?

Certainly not as interesting as the world outside of it in which I live. The room is as empty as space and just as infinite. But the solar systems and planets within it are more populated than my world.

Certainly this is not a letter to you Jack of Diamonds because I know you will not respond to it. I’ve become the unreliable narrator of my own life, no longer sure which story is true or what person I am in which circumstance. This is simply a call out to those as strange as you once were (whether you’ve become idealized or not; you most surely are no longer as strange as the person who lives in my memory).

Certainly I do not want to return to the mad house although whenever I’m reminded of the music, air, and feeling of Jersey I would love nothing more than to be in its confines. I simply am tired of the special snowflakes and having to cater to their privilege, although it is fair to say that I have always been tired of that. Perhaps I’ve gotten too old for it to be romantic to be this unhappy.

Certainly I’m not the only person who’s sat down and had that moment of, “Oh, this is what it feels like to go crazy.” Certainly not.