Fresh Eggs

I thumbed open another egg carton, and saw a broken egg. Curving around me the impatient shoppers waited for me to find a carton with all good eggs so I could move down the milk aisle.

They couldn't see me intentionally breaking an egg in each new carton by squeezing the round styrofoam when I picked the carton up.

They couldn't hear the thoughts in my head.  My hands were shaking with carthartic power to break each egg while in my mind I was shouting, another bad egg! Another bad egg! Eventually when yolk was running up my wrist, a woman told me I was picking the cartons up incorrectly and breaking the eggs. That's why I was getting bad cartons. Under her command, I picked up another carton carefully, without breaking an egg. The others were shocked. Clean eggs.

I thanked her stupidly and went down the milk aisle.

I was going to leave without buying my groceries. The grocery store was a place where I went to calm down and it always made me feel poor. Being poor wasn't even my problem. My problem was the medication I was taking and how it made me feel.

Another bad egg!

I am a second class citizen because I'm forced to take pills that alter my personality. I've been on them my entire adult life. My opinion is regarded as being unimportant by the treatment professionals who want me to take the pills. I still hallucinate, anyway. I'd like to tell my doctor the truth but the truth will cause him to reconsider my dosage--always improving the prognosis by ramping up the milligrams.

Or was he improving my prognosis? The medication has never helped with voices. I know why I hear them: I'm being targeted by local criminals and being used as an example. They park their cars up the street from my house and call into the air:

Another bad egg! --intentionally breaking one every time.

I'd rather live with the symptoms of poor mental health than live here.

Who can I really blame? The criminals have authority so they appear to be cops. Like the rumors of CIA intervention in foreign governments, I imagine the men and women who monitor me went rogue. The one truth is the effect of drugs on them. They crack under the pressure: like Phillip K. Dick said, they were helpless from being totally destroyed by drugs.

They thumb across my shell, and break it to get to the insides.

Another bad egg!