She has trouble acting normal

When she was here, she was never all there. I'm not being mean, those were her words . She always felt slightly off and would say she was in a different frequency or different light waves. She would have these long conversations with herself while we were fixing dinner or watching a game on TV. If you interupted she would just sorta stare ...and so we learned to stop doing that.

When were out in public she was jumpy and skittish, like a kitten next to a window. Her eyes would dart around the room looking for escape routes. When the waitress would come and ask: "What will you have?" she was as likely to say: "fulfillment and ecstasy" as grilled cheese, you never knew. My friends thought she was way too weird, high maintenence and all that, but they never really knew her that well.

She would talk for hours about the suicide attempts, and why that need came back to her every few months.

I break sometimes, and it's painful, and I need to go away... to a different place, and I guess if I was dead it would be different, but when I'm dying the life part of me pulls me back, so, you know, here I am.

She loved life more than anyone I ever knew. She would paint trees and mountains from memory and sang songs that made strangers cry when she sang them on the corner (donations were turned over to the local homeless shelter). She could be furious in a second and would cry for hours over small children screamed at by Dollar General Store parents and puppies left wandering on small highways.

How can they do that? How can they?

Her eyes and hands, open and pleading. I had no good answer and after a while I would just hold her and let her beat my back with her fists (sometimes leaving bruises). Life was always hard for her, like she was born without shock absorbers and could feel every bump. She most have thought the rest of us were pretty callous.

Sometime ago she was hospitalized and now is on some medicine. The last time I saw her she was quite a bit calmer, but at a cost . I talked to her for a while at bar and when I walked away I couldn't help shaking my head. Later, when I was trying to describe it to someone, I told them it was like seeing an old black and white movie that had been colorized, except in reverse. I don't like either idea much.