Silently seeking detection.

SILENTLY SEEKING DETECTION.
sneak

According to the doctors my neurosis is all in my head.
I slipped into my straight-jacket and made for the door.
I just needed some kind of release. No one understood, but doesn't
everyone say that?
I was beginning to ask myself the same inane questions that highly paid
shrinks had been asking me for years.
I wondered if I should charge myself. Top rate of course. I deserved
the best.
The best a man can get...
Billboards with perfect people selling perfect lives loomed at every
turn.
Perhaps I'd been too hasty.
I started to reminisce about my time inside.
A steady rumbling in the pit of my stomach signalled that all was not
well in the real world.
I craved my soft white walls and flickering light.
The regimental way that I'd lived for the past decade seemed somehow
endearing to me now.
The randomness of the urban landscape only left me gasping for the
normality of the asylum.
Relief, however, was to prove hard to find.
At every turn there seemed to be some kind of new age casualty.
Soft topped, hard faced subversives blasting their own personal
preferences into the faces of innocent bystanders.
Mobile phones for mobile clones shrilled in stressful symphony.
I looked to the sky for answers.
If there was a god he was keeping his head down.
Slabs of black cloud hid his guilt from view, masking the world they'd
have us believe he created.
And to think these people are normal?
I tried to smile but my face wouldn't take the strain.
I opted instead for the default setting that I'd been born with. The
one that keeps people away.
Or at least it used to.
The world had changed since my time inside.
Alcohol seemed to rule the day and aggression the night.
I wandered for concrete miles in search of sanity but all I found was
an uncivilised civilisation.
Idiots with nothing to say said it all the same and freaks like me
listened because we lacked the attention they so craved.
I was craving less and less by the slaughtered minute.
I knew that leaving the sanctuary of my stark padded cell had been a
mistake of epidemic proportions.
The depths of my jacket pocket produced a crumpled piece of paper with
a neatly written telephone number upon it in red ink.
I smiled a natural smile for the first time since gaining unauthorised
freedom.
The orderly fashion in which the digits had been written could only
mean one thing.
The note had been planted there by the most orderly person I knew, the
head shrink.
His confidence in my failure to survive the real world would be
verified before the night was over.
Who was I to prove such a distinctive professor of psychology
wrong?
Who was I? Who am I? Where am I?
I lied through broken teeth and in so doing sealed myself in padded
silent luxury.

sneak