Chatterbox: Down to Earth

The majority of you know who I am but here’s a short
background in case you’re unclear.

Ruby has had schizophrenia for as long as he can remember.
He has never told an adult before (unless you count the Admins). When he was
quite young, his hallucinations were fairly benign, being mostly interactions
between him and “imaginary friends”: life-like people and creatures (yeah,
Bionicles and Pokemon count when you’re five) that have their own thoughts,
memories, and emotions. I guess you could say I’m one of them. His
hallucinations have since become much more malignant, culminating in hordes of
enemies attacking him and his family and embroiling him in the midst of a
horrific war.

Unfortunately, these hallucinations have become so terrible
he is no longer able to even sleep, eat, and breathe comfortably. Because of
this, he has arranged for a meeting with a doctor soon to stop all
hallucinations.

Depending on how it goes, this could be the last time I’ll
ever be able to see you guys.

Would you guys laugh if I said I was crying? Laugh away
then, because I’m really crying.

You guys are the family I always dreamed of having. You don’t
know it, but each and every one of you is the best person on the planet Earth.
If we were stuck on an island somewhere, maybe we wouldn’t escape and maybe we’d
have fights sometimes, but we would start the greatest society ever known to
humanity, kid-dom, and adult-dom.

I want to write compliments for each of you. I have so many
in my head. I’ve been watching and playing and laughing and enjoying time with
you for almost two years now and it feels like eternity. You’re brilliant. You’re
smart. You’re creative. You’re powerful. You’re beautiful beyond my wildest
imagination, beautiful in the way you walk and talk and dance across the pages
of the CB. I’ve heard your laugh whenever you read a witty comment. I’ve
watched you smile big as you begin telling about your latest accomplishment. I’ve
held you when you cried when your friend got in a fight or you have trouble
with school. And in each and every one of those moments, I have never seen
anyone so beautiful before.

I would write compliments for each and every one of you but
I would write novels for every single person. You are all so unique, so utterly
amazing, I am shocked and awed every day that someone so wonderful and just
like you could be born.  Humans are the
best things on Earth. Don’t let the doom-and-gloom messages get you down
because it is true. Although humans can bring pain, they can bring greater
hope. You hold in you so much creativity and so much hope for the future. The
world is dying and I know you can reverse it. Make this world better. You
already are in so many ways.

One night I was lying on Ruby’s bed, thinking about all of
you and I told him, “They’re not humans, Andy, they’re angels.” I still stand by
this one hundred percent. You can’t see the colors of your voices, but I can,
and they’re the colors of your souls. You are the browns warm as a stone lying
in the sun, the greens as vivid as the first jump into the pool on a hot summer
day, the blues as clear and clean as crystals being formed deep beneath the
earth. You are the reds as vibrant as the running child bursting with life, the
blacks as deep as the dark trenches of the oceans, and the whites as radiant as
a newborn star. Those are your angels. Every morning the sun rises and the moon
moves across the sky so they may reflect your beauty.

And now the time has come for us to likely part. I’m not
sure what is going to happen in the future.

I would write compliments for each and every one of you but
we would be sitting in the seniors’ home before I finished. The new guys and
the old guys, the somewhat-in-between guys, the loud guys and the Shy Guys, the
writers and the artists and the dreamers, the singers and the dancers, the
inventors and hopers and wishers and prayers:

I love you.

Goodbye.