It took 28 years and he learned how to survive himself. He could sit calmly with the parts he did not like. Girls liked him, and everybody wanted to be his friend. All he had to do was get rid of the parts nobody liked. Now, he has a girlfriend he does not love, and many friends who do not love him, and the parts he does not care for starve in a steamer trunk beneath his house.
One is always right and constantly drinking. Another sweats over page after page of St. Augustine in pursuit of some truth the first seems to have unfettered access to. One is a violent philanderer; his muscles belong in a prison yard.
One is a little girl whose dollhouse has never seen a domestic dispute worth calling the police over.
There remains an ongoing war with the pills; nobody wins.
It’ll start with word salad and end with a harmless trip to the psych ward– with prophecy in between; stained pink with Clozapine. He will be sedated. He will be locked up, and beaten senseless by the prisoner. He’ll receive a lecture from the drunk.
The scholar is deaf or indifferent.
Once he’s been bruised and lectured and thoroughly ignored, he’s met by the little girl.
She drags him to safety, and she says “it is time for tea.”
She draws his attention to the scene she’s laid out in the dollhouse.
His miniature plastic girlfriend weeps in the kitchen, and tries to pry open a miniature plastic bottle of wine while his miniature plastic friends are queued at the door. They knock and sit calmly with themselves, and wait to be let in.
His miniature plastic fists pound the lid of the steamer trunk.
She gives up on the bottle of wine, and washes his pills down with water from the tap.
His friends leave, the police arrive, and the little girl hands him an empty plastic teacup.
He plays along while his girlfriend lies motionless.
The little girl smiles.
“Thanks for the show.”