DIAGNOSES | Tyler Fair

(from Greek, meaning “to know apart
[from another]”)

Waiting for the 105 at the corner of Colfax and Havana,
where I watch my step on needle-lined cement,
a guy swears and rocks on a bench.
He’s shoeless, other than a holey pair
of treaded ER slipper socks.

They were once blue, the same color I’d used three months ago.
Perseverates and paces, my chart stated
—as if there were anything else
in that locked hospital basement to do.
“I’m exercising,” I would have told the nurses,
if they’d ever asked.

The intersection’s 7-Eleven,
catty-corner from the bus stop,
blares classical music.
It took a month commuting to my chaplaincy internship
to realize Mozart and Vivaldi bullied away concrete nappers
—herding all to CVS’s silent lot.
There they tabernacled.

Tonight, I’m here late, seeking
a place to get my back against a wall when a woman skips over.
Black, lean, early 20s,
she’s wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and a pink mini skirt.
Before I can wonder how she makes her money, she blurts,
“Stop being depressed!”
Then, weaving headlit traffic, she’s off.
Where the hell is that bus?

Six minutes later, she returns.
Strap drooping from shoulder, five feet between us,
she glances back and forth,
as if searching for a lost friend.
She pivots on her flip-flopped foot,
stares deeply.

“You’re bipolar like me!”

Spinning,
she jaywalks (well, jayruns)
back to the land of Tchaikovsky
and cherry slushies,
before I can even
agree.

Tyler Fair is a candidate for the dual graduate degree program between Yale Divinity School and UConn School of Social Work. Fair has worked in a variety of clinical setting ranging from a hospice certified nurse assistant and hospital chaplaincy to most recently working as an outpatient pediatric mental health therapist. He is obsessed with researching the places where spirituality meets health outcomes, particularly mental health.