There's an interesting intertextual link with this song and When I Write My Master's Thesis from the same album. In that song, the narrator describes researching the sanatorium the narrator here is in: "Oh the hours I spent in the archives wearing cotton gloves/Shuffling photos from the Ninette Sanatorium Halloween parties/Emaciated ghosts hiding in those curtains' creases."
So the two narrators are a hundred years apart, with this song being a letter the other narrator found in his research.
There's an interesting intertextual link with this song and When I Write My Master's Thesis from the same album. In that song, the narrator describes researching the sanatorium the narrator here is in: "Oh the hours I spent in the archives wearing cotton gloves/Shuffling photos from the Ninette Sanatorium Halloween parties/Emaciated ghosts hiding in those curtains' creases."
So the two narrators are a hundred years apart, with this song being a letter the other narrator found in his research.