“Men are climbing to the moon but they don’t seem interested in the beating human heart.”

- excerpted from a letter written March 1st, 1961 by Marilyn Monroe to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. 

These words were written shortly after her release from New York’s Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. A single sentence swimming in her six page re-telling of the hospital stay, but they hold you. A sweet summation of science versus sympathy, of the head throttling the heart. Humanity’s tug o’ war, and she describes it with the honesty of a second-grader. 

It’s strange to picture her in a faded hospital gown, propped in the corner of a padded cell. Or sitting with glassy-eyed women playing cards, watching the ones muttering to walls or chairs or an invisible someone. Any witnesses must have momentarily checked their sanity - how crazy was it to see this woman, the modern Aphrodite, stripped down to her sorriest, deeply human self? Like a drunk angel beaten bloody in a bar fight. That had to have been just plain surreal.