• I came home to a friend of mine sleeping in my living room. It was about 9:00 in the afternoon, and the summer sun had retreated a considerable amount. The power had been out for some time, and we were getting ready to move, so no one had been residing there for the past couple of days. but sure enough, my friend lay there in the dark, by himself.

    Our conversation was short. He told me about how he had been sleeping out in the dry fields just outside of town. Through the darkness, I could sense a surreal tone in his voice.

    When I had met him, he seemed to be rather happy soul, although he was quite uptight. It was like he was afraid of being evil, or wrong. On that night, he seemed different though. His usual short well thought out sentences were replaced by calm and smooth replies, like he no longer had a care in the world. His religious morals and worries had been stripped away over the past few months, and in their place was a hopelessly calm approach to life.


    I left him there for the night. I saw no harm in letting him camp out in my living room instead of under the stars, laying in the hard matted dirt and dried grass. It was the last time I saw him, although I often thought of what it might be like for him when he slept out in that field. I'd imagine that he felt like a speck of dirt, as many do when they gaze into the open maw of the sky, but he had also just recently abandoned the idea of a celestial being protecting him. The freedom and the loneliness must have been overwhelming.


    A year later, another one of my friends asked me if I heard what had happened to him. They told me that they had seen him walking down the street, heading into town from the field in which he slept. They took him to a local diner, and got him some coffee. The whole time they were there, my friend that I had found in my empty apartment, was making rather profound statements about nothing. He would spout one sentence after another, each phrase failed to make much sense, but still managed to chill everyone to the bone. After they were done, they dropped him off at pretty much the same spot where they had found him.


    Later that night, he had gone home, and stabbed his father 17 times.