October, 1984.

Two police officers arrived at my apartment with paperwork already signed. I wasn't under arrest. I was being evaluated. Thirty days at Hargrove State Psychiatric Institute, they told me. Standard procedure.

Hargrove was the kind of place that looked older than the reasons people gave for building it. Fluorescent lights that flattened faces. Corridors that smelled of industrial cleaner covering something older beneath it. Patients who watched the world with a half-second delay, as if they were waiting for permission to react.

The doctors called it integration therapy.

The people who came back from it still looked like themselves.

They just didn't seem entirely there anymore.

Forty years later, I still don't know what Hargrove was trying to make room for.