The Crazy Man's Story - Part 1 I don't hear my voices anymore, so I'm a little... lost. I guess they would've told this story better than me, or at least they would've had opinions, ideas or suggestions for me about what to say at the beggining, middle and end. After all this time, I tend to forget things, and their help would've been of great value. Many things have happened, and sometimes I'm not sure about some incidents actually happening. A memory as solid as a rock suddenly turns as vaporous as fog. This is one of the main problems of being crazy: you are never sure of anything. For a long time I thought everything had started with a death and ended with another, like a good pair of bookmarks, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe what really put everything on the move so many years ago, when I was young and truly crazy, was something more... insignificant, ephemereal, like hidden jealously o caged anger, or something more universal and permanent, like the stars of the cosmos or the strength of the ocean waves. I know some people died, and I had the luck of not joining them, which was one of the last observations my voices made me before dissapearing forever. Now, instead of their annoying verborrhea, I have medicines to prevent their return. Once a day I take a psychotroph, an oblong blue pill that leaves my mouth so dry that when I talk, I sound like a professional smoker old man. Afterwards is a bitter mind booster for fighting the ocassional and suicidal #depression in which, according to my therapist, I may sink at any moment, independently of how I feel. That cruel pill constipates me and makes me retain fluids, like having an esphygnomanometer sawn around my waist, and not on my arm. So, additionally, I have to take a diuretic and a laxative to cure those symptoms. The diuretic gives me a terrible headache, as if someone cruelly hit me with a hammer; I fight that symptom with an analgesic with codeine. And every two weeks, they inject me a potent antipsychotic agent at the ambulatory, where I drop my pants in front of a nurse who always smiles and asks me in the same way and with the same tone how am I doing, to which I always answer: "I'm fine", independently of how I fell, because I know, even with the craziness, and the effects of the medicines, that she doesn't give a crap about me, but she considers asking part of her job anyway. Sometimes I feel as if my imagination was an uncontrolable Domino that has lost all balance, it shakes forward and backwards, and then crumbles against every other force in my body, all of this producing a powerful chain reaction: "click, click, click...", in my inside. It was much easier when I was still young and all I had to do was listen to the voices. Most of the time they weren't that bad. In those times they were faint, like an echo vanishing through a valley, or the whispers of children, however, when the situation intensified, their volumen increased quickly. In a way, the voices made me company, specially the many times I didn't have friends. I had two friends once, and they were part of history. I thought before that they were the most important part, but I'm not sure now. Many of who I knew during what I like to consider my years of true craziness turned out worse than myself. Their voices yelled orders at them, like a sergeant: "Move it!", "Do this!", "Do that!", or even worse: "Commit suicide!", or even worse: "Kill someone!". The voices that tormented those people came from God, Jesus, Mahoma, the neighbor's dog, their late grandfather, aliens, a chorus of angels or a chorus of demons. In situations like that, I would better wait outside the room, or in the waiting room because most probably something unfortunate was about to happen. It turns out very difficult being a crazy person nowadays. Being a middle aged crazy person. Or don't be it, but only while you take the medicines...