All my life I’ve had this thing where strangers tell me the oddest things about themselves. Perhaps I should have gone into psychology. I might be a little better adjusted myself. Though, everyone I’ve known that has gone into the field, or practices within it, seems to have a few screws loose. (Does it go without saying that everyone has a few screws loose?)

I briefly dated a psych graduate student who lived exclusively on diet coke and cigarettes. We were cooking breakfast in her kitchen once and she wanted to point out that all eggs still had umbilical cords linking yoke with white, even in the frying pan. She jostled the little sizzling cord with her spoon. There’s an apt metaphor for the walking wounded, playing out the traumas of birth and youth in unrelated circumstance.

She had a police scanner that she would use to eavesdrop on her neighbor’s phone calls. Her last boyfriend had been a cop and she picked up the habit from him. “It’s really odd knowing all the intimate details of their lives when you don’t actually know them. It’s hard not to ask questions when we pass on the stairs because I’m not supposed to know what I do.”

Several months after we dated I got a call that she had been admitted to a psych ward and had listed me as her only friend. The not eating combined with her meds and the stress of school had pushed her over the edge. I knew she had a mother that she was close to and puzzled about why I got that call when her family wasn’t far and we were never close. Perhaps I wanted to see her family as the nourishing white part of her egg, when really they were either the frying pan or the fire. Perhaps she hoped I’d be an anchor for her ship adrift.

Foucault talks extensively in Madness and Civilization about how reason had long been perceived as something that you could lose and if you lost it you were encouraged to find it by seeking for it. Hence the phrase “ship of fools.” At one point it was common practice to place the insane on ships that drifted around the rivers and oceans of Europe so that they could seek out their missing reason on the wind. I was no anchor for that girl. My own shifting sands brook no tethers. I don’t know where she’s drifted now.