“Here you go, ma’am, and visiting hours end at two o’ clock.”

Lisa couldn’t really say she ever held much of any, if any, fondness for hospitals. They always held such grim connotations in her mind: sterile, white-walled buildings full of the dying and ailing. Sure, some people would tell her, when she quietly shivered upon entering the doors of a hospital, that this was where you went to get better, not die, but it never really changed the fact that she would rather be elsewhere.
And, on top of the crime of being a hospital, this was a special hospital, one for the psychologically, not physically, injured. Nothing, in Lisa’s mind, could be worse than a mental institution, because there was less of a margin for curing, here, and there was just something catastrophically depressing about the eyes of the patients that were lead around by the nurses.
Giving a tiny nod to the smiling, young-faced nurse at the reception desk, Lisa picked up the badge that signified her status and turned to find a seat. Looking around the lobby, she visually roamed from person to person, taking in the sight of each of the other visitors. An elderly couple sat together, both reading out-dated and tattered magazines, sharing an expression of dread, worry, and confusion; a single, lone girl sat in a chair, clutching her badge and blankly staring ahead, who looked to be perhaps seventeen or eighteen; a middle-aged couple sort of miserably failed at keeping up a hopeful, cheery disposition as they shared small-talk between themselves; a pair of dark-skinned, scraggly-haired men waited perfectly still and wild-eyed. Lisa really didn’t want to, nor need to, know what their individual purposes were for being here.
Taking a chair in a corner, far away from the others, she crossed her legs and rested her head in the palm of her hand. Allowing herself a moment to close her eyes and focus her mind, she tried to unwind slightly from what had, by almost anyone’s definition, been an unpleasant week. Visiting my sister in a nuthouse, Lisa thought, was not on my list of ‘Things I Always Wanted To Do.’
“Here to see someone, or be committed?” inquired a voice from her right-hand side. Blinking and turning her head, Lisa looked and saw that a pale, handsome man had taken the seat next to her. His eyes smile, she reflexively thought, and then greeted him with a tiny, forced and plastic smile of her own.
His features looked almost worn, she noticed, but there was an inimitable, warm glow to his aura of presence. His teeth shone ivory, and, if it were feasible, winked back at her from behind his lips. “I – uh, well . . . Visiting.” She uncrossed her legs and shifted her posture, straightening up in her seat and turning her head towards him. She sort of grimaced and held up the plastic, laminated tag for him to see. Her name, Lisa Jerusalem, was scrawled in sloppy, black, marker-letters across it.
“Never a pleasant affair, is it, Miss Jerusalem?” he empathised, “you have an interesting surname. Quite the definitive Christian name, you could say.” He leaned back and propped his elbow on the back of the seat. It was for the first time that she perceived the colour of his eyes: they were a very fetching hue of pale hazel, almost orange, with dancing flecks of silver. She met his gaze for a half of second, then looked away and down, ashamedly. He chuckled, softly; it sounded almost like a piano hitting low, bass keys, three in quick progression.
“It’s not — I mean, visiting is not pleasant,” she stuttered, from what seemed far away, all of a sudden, “Jerusalem is my real last name . . . I, uh, got it from my father?” Lisa squirmed in her seat, wriggling almost unnoticeably in discomfort. There really weren’t any intelligent-sounding replies to that question, of course.
“Ah, well, it has an interesting rhythm to it. What’s your middle name, just so that I may have an idea of the whole music of your name?”
“It’s Lisa Reason Jerusalem . . . “
“Oh, wonderful; Mmm, beautiful.” The man seemed to practically be tasting the sound of her name in his mouth. It was disturbing. “So, what, or shall I say who, brings you out to these hallowed halls of insanity?”
Ducking down in her chair, Lisa tried her best to remain inconspicuous in her corner, hoping to God nobody could hear this conversation. “Uh, my sister is being treated here. I came to see her.” I don’t think this guy is supposed to be wandering around the lobby — I bet he’s a patient that got loose, or something.
The man stood up and ran a hand through his medium-length, shaggy, black hair that curled all over his scalp and crashed onto his forehead, haphazardly. Having moved from a sitting to a standing position, it was blatantly obvious that his full height was verging on five feet, in tall shoes, which elicited a snigger from Lisa that she attempted to muffle with her hands. He spread his arms out and spoke, then, in a verbose projection like an actor on a stage.

“How we all belong in cages, made to sit and stare through blank pages. Scribing books in forgotten words of old, making copies for our pampered, golden lords. The time for rapture is upon us, the age of capture will fast fall behind, and we will rise from twisted waves of red, our heads fully in the white clouds of heaven.”

He then bowed with professionally mimicked flourish, and returned to his seat enthusiastically. Everybody in the lobby had stopped what they were doing to stare, bewildered and flabbergasted, at the short, little, self-selected performer. The two black-skinned men were hunched forward, mouths agape, revealing bright, white teeth; the teen-aged girl peeked over the fashion magazine she was holding in front of her face; the middle-aged couple who so pathetically acted falsely content now chattered excitedly between themselves, words like ‘lunatic’ and ‘escapee’ and ‘madman’ flitting into Lisa’s hearing; the elderly couple sadly exchanged a glance that spoke a lengthy amount of unheard words, as was the practice of those who had been around long enough to have seen it all. Lisa put her head in her hands and did her best to let her brown hair veil who she was.
“What do you think? I wrote it my—“
“You can come back now, Miss,” announced the soft, welcome voice of a young, clipboard-bearing nurse. Lisa scooped up her purse in a flurry and rushed over to the nurse, then faltered on her feet and spun around. Going back over to where she had been sitting, she grabbed the badge from the floor where she had absentmindedly let it drop from her hands, then virtually ran past the nurse in her desperate dash from the lobby. When she had gotten around the corner, where she knew nobody in the lobby could see her, she muttered, graciously, "Thank God." The black-haired poet jut out his bottom lip and pouted.

“Nobody ever stays to tell me what they think.”