Almost sixty years ago, when they actually had such things, my father was an orderly in a mental institution and there was a patient there who was totally uncommunicative.
Being otherwise more or less functional, my father garnered an old typewriter in the hopes he could establish some rapport with him. It didn't work, but the fellow did avail himself of the typewriter and spent long hours typing away in what seemed to my father like gibberish.
After the man passed away, it turned out he had no relatives and because my father was the closest to him, they gave my father his personal effects, whereupon he simply boxed them up, brought them home, and put them away where they resided for several decades.
After I grew up and my father found out I needed a subject for my master's thesis in psychology, he told me the story and presented me with the box of writings thinking maybe I could use it. Not wanting to disappoint my father, of course, I accepted the papers and acted as if I might indeed be able to use them, but actually just threw the box in the top of an old closet and forgot about it for another couple of decades until it came time to do some cleaning.
Remembering the story my father had told me, I examined the papers again with a fresh eye and realized there was at least a little sense to it. The hard part was that it was written completely without any punctuation whatsoever. No sentence or paragraph breaks, no "he said, she said," no commas, periods, nothing, just an endless series of words, but as I worked on it, the story gradually began to unfold and I realized it was actually a pretty damned good story at that.
So, that's why it has taken so long to finish. First I had to find an appropriate venue, and then, in my spare time, I had to painstakingly reproduce it in readable form, adding structure and punctuation where necessary.
I wish now that I knew more about him, his name, who he was, where he was from, what happened to him to put him into that place, but all that is now lost in the mists of time... except for his story.
Regards... Tecuman
