Sanity grows on trees, which is great if you are a giraffe, or at least an elephant with a long trunk.
It's not at all like money or strawberries.
 It's plentiful in its lush canopies, and ripest on the topmost branches. I guess it's not such a bad deal if you are a monkey either. Monkeys can climb trees. As can larger primates. Alas, that is not the case with me.
When I first heard about this, I had the same reaction you are probably having now. And no, it's not at all a metaphor. I mean it. Sanity grows on trees that yield fruit three times a year, lightly sweet, crisp, sky-colored fruit. The fruit is small but potent. It's the great ironic incarnation of all those as-yet-undiscovered flowers the environmentalist lament in the waning Amazon--you know, the ones that might hold the cure for cancer or AIDS or halitosis. It's real. Palpable. Edible. And it works.
You can't ask me how or why it works. You can tell me it's the placebo effect, but you have to grant me that full-frontal psychosis isn't quite the same as a psychosomatic migraine. And how the hell would you know anyway?
How I know is another issue. There are some legal complications that impede my ability to give you an answer. All I can say is this: I've seen it. I have seen a bite of the fruit clear a mind
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like a drop of dish detergent into greasy water in those commercials. And it wasn't a mouse or a rat, and not a rambling crazy giraffe either. It was a man with a soul so thorny and twisted I still shudder to remember the burning heat of his gaze, like his eyes were not the windows to his soul at all, but lakes of tar in the slums of hell. He was scary shit. And now he's not.
The guy took a bite out of the lumpy blue orb, not even bothering to wash it, and before he even swallowed, the inferno in his irises had cooled. And he turned away from the hand holding the fruit, looked right at me, and smiled. They just let him go after that, like he'd never so much as killed a gnat. There was no reason to worry because he was fixed.
I could get in a lot of trouble if you tell anyone I told you this. But I had to tell you so you would know it was real, even though you're not supposed to. It's a precious thing, especially if you're born without it. Not quite like a donated kidney or something, but pretty useful nonetheless.
Of course at this point the conversation is moot anyway, just like my precautions. Sanity grows on trees, and it's edible. But what the man ate was the last that was left of a very small stash, and now no one knows where to find the trees anymore. Maybe we're asking the wrong animals.
nth
Photography © Mollie Bryan
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