Sharen's Story: "Everybody Can Find The Right Person."

Sharen stood in front of me in a pink shirt with pink nails, eating saltines and spooning melted chocolate ice cream. She was slouching confidently—4 foot 8 and 65 years old.

“This is my dinner,” she said, shaking the saltines.

“The white lab coat syndrome,” she began. “They’re trying to keep me here.” She gestured around the psychiatric hospital. “They want your gold,” she added, rubbing her fingers together mischievously.

She had spent four weeks in the psychiatric hospital.

She explained how she ended up in the psych ward—it started when she accidentally put ear drops in her eye, and it spiraled downhill from there.

“I was going to buy a beautiful dress,” she started. “I came home, my eyes were dry, I took the bottle on top of my dresser. It looked like eye drops. I had a brand-new ring on and earrings. I was like, ‘Oh, I'm hot shit.’ Then I put ear drops in my eyes.”

She yelled out to her husband, Bill, “Oh my god, my eyes are burning right out of the socket!” She vigorously tried to wash them over the sink. They went straight to the emergency room.

“They stuck me under the eye-splash station for an hour. They gave me two milligrams of Atenolol. I’m hysterical, thinking I’m having surgery.“ The doctor checked her eye and told her she was fine to go home.

“I’m fucked up on Atenolol, staggering out in the bright sun. I say, ‘I’m getting out of the hospital, and get me a cigarette, god damn it!’ I fell in the construction parking lot. I was walking like this—” she bulged out her hips, dropped open her jaw, and bugged out her eyes. “I fell over a metal construction rope on the way to my husband’s car.”

“Two weeks after I fell, I started speaking a foreign language.”

Her friends told her she switched back and forth between sounding like she was from England, Germany, Spain, and France.

“My friend told me, ‘I’m worried about you. I think there’s something going on with you. You’ve been hiding with gibberish for months. You go, “Oh, mon dieu, let’s go to—”’”

She rolled her R’s loudly in the middle of the psych ward.

“‘ITALY!’ I go, ‘What the hell do I have to hide? I have it all!’”

She turned the conversation to her and Bill.

They'd been together for 47 years—high school sweethearts.

“I asked him on the first date, to Sadie Hawkins. Mona Montinez, with her hair down to her ass, was going to ask him. He dated all the hotties and I got to him first!”

She continued, “Do you want me to tell you how to stay married to your high school sweetheart?”

“Good sex. Give and take. Treat each other with respect, allow each other to be individuals. Do things together.”

“Bill likes to golf. I decided to try it when I saw all those cute little outfits. I said, ‘Oh, golf is fun!’”

I asked her what her experience in the psychiatric hospital had been like over the past four weeks.

“I’ve been so drugged up I don’t even know.”

She then went on to share some life lessons.

“I’m a flirt.” She smiled at me and looked around. “I flirt, then tell them I have a husband. Then I move on to the next.”

I told Sharen I didn’t know if I believed in soulmates. She acted shocked and gave me a piece of her mind:

“Bill and I are soulmates. We were in a past life, that’s why I believe in reincarnation.”

“Men have a very high opinion of themselves. If you meet your soulmate and you know it, you’re very lucky. You should expand on it. Everybody can find the right person.”

“Your soul, your heart, your being. You need to know your soul first. You just know it. Instincts.”

“When I first met Bill, I didn’t think he was my soulmate. I was like, ‘quit tugging my hair!’ It was his little way of flirting. The more irritating he got, the more I realized I liked him.

"He was challenging. Took a lot of work. Bill tried to break up with me all the time because I was trying to break up with him. If you want someone, go after them. If you don’t want them, don’t go after it.”

She looked around and came back to reality. “Why am I here? I was supposed to go [to the doctor] for my neck and back. I don’t understand why I'm here,” she said as she colored a magazine in her slippers, pink plaid pajama set, and chalk-green robe.

She was finally released from the psychiatric hospital the next morning. Bill came to pick her up—her knight in shining armor.

She gave me a drawing of a pink pig in spring grass, per my request. I handed her my contact information with a note: “Let’s go shopping.”

Bill wheeled her out of the ward in a wheelchair, through the locked, windowless double doors.

They rolled into the sunset—rather, the fluorescently lit hospital wing. After four weeks of treatment, they returned to living—happily ever after.