Crazy

Today’s prompt: “She was crazy that way.”

She was crazy that way. No, not the diagnosable-mental-illness-that-can-be-treated-with-drugs-and-or-therapy-and-that-we-should-all-have-a-lot-of-sympathy-for-because-haven’t-we-all-suffered-from-anxiety-and-depression-sometimes way. No, not the less-easily-treatable-but-it’s-not-like-it’s-their-fault-so-could-we-not-fucking-stigmatize-them-for-fuck’s-sake-they’re-perfectly-harmless way. Not the synonym-for-wacky-that-we-use-when-we’re-speaking-carelessly way. No, she was crazy in the Lovecraftian way, where she probably just read The King in Yellow, or maybe watched it performed, and oh holy cats, did you and she just come out of that same theater, and good god Bast, what’s that on the marquee? “Le Roi En Jaune?” Wow, okay, here’s the thing, sanity works different here in the Lovecraftian universe than it works in real life. It’s more like something you can lose when you look at something too scary or weird, and once you lose it, you basically turn into the living embodiment of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. “Mad,” per the Lovecraftian universe, means you run around paranoid, vulnerable, and incapable of protecting yourself, like any second you could dart into traffic and – hey watch out THERE’S A BUS.