DAY ONE
Here I am. At the beginning of infinity. At the gate of heaven and hell. At the large swinging door that serves as the barrier between the lobby and the hospital. I have one choice. Erica has already left. I could leave as well. Right now. Tell the nurse that I have decided not to go through with treatment, and hide away in my hotel room for a month. I could do it, too. I am no stranger to hiding away from people. It is what I have done practically my whole life.
This door.
This fucking door.
I could live with an eternity of trying to forgive myself for all the pain I’ve caused other people, or an eternity of continuing to suffer…
Why does this all have to be so black and white?
Nobody really knows why I am here. Nobody really knows what I need. I know what I need.
Do I not?
My body reacts against me. It fights me. What kind of life am I supposed to live when my own body wants me to die? What kind of sick, self-loathing is this?
What life is this?
I have crossed over. I am in the clear. I am no longer in control. Of anything. My voice does not sound like my own. I am not saying words that I would ever say out loud.
“I want to die.”
“I hate myself.”
“I cannot make the pain stop.”
My body acts in ways that I did not know it could. When they smile at me, I do not smile back. When the nurse says, “Good luck,” I merely nod. And when they hand me a small paper cup full of pills, and tell me that the head psychiatrist has prescribed them to me, I take them without even thinking.
Why did I do this? Have I given up? Walking through that door was giving up. I lay down on the bed. They refer to it as “my” bed, but this is not my bed. This is their bed, and I have given up, so I am laying in it. The small paper cup sits next to me on the floor. A paper cup. The holder of life and death.
I have taken pills to die. Do I have the willpower to take pills to live?
As I lay on the bed (their bed), I think of what is on the outside that I have left. My husband. My husband sits outside of these walls. My husband, who, in our short time of being married, has already seen me at my best and my worst. My husband, whose strength to forgive me has outweighed any strength I have ever had to press harder into my wrist on the worst of nights. My husband, who I have lied to and deceived so I could continue my sick addiction of slowly killing myself.
There are no windows in this room. They called this room “my” room, but it is not my room. For one thing, I share it with two other people, who are still asleep because it is 6:30 AM and nobody in their right mind voluntarily gets up before 8.
Of course, this is a mental institution. Nobody is in their right mind here.
All the walls are painted white. Not eggshell white, or off white. Just white. If I were not mentally unstable before, I would be after staring at these fucking walls. Everything is white. The walls, the ceiling, the tile floors, the metal bed frame, the sheets that are ever so subtly locked onto the bed so that if I ever got the idea of hanging myself in the middle of the night, I would have to find a more creative way than with the bed attire.
I squirm myself between the sheets and the mattress, trying to find a comfortable way to lie in their bed. I feel like I am in a cocoon.
When I emerge from my suicide preventing cocoon, I will be a beautiful Ada butterfly that no longer wants to kill herself, and I will be beautiful, and I will soar high above any human worries, and I will love myself and people will love me because I love me, and the only true way to show that you are worth loving is to love yourself.
Instead, I wake up several hours later, the same Ada that I was before, only much more disappointed with my situation. I am the same small, fragile caterpillar that I was this morning, and a single day in my new habitat will not change that.
I crawl out of my useless cocoon and place my feet on the floor.
I hear a crunching sound.
When I lift my feet, I see the paper cup from before, now squashed into a mini pancake. “Mazel tov,” I say to myself quietly, and then shiver, wondering why I am so cold.
Oh, right.
They took my shoes.
They took my shoes, they took my coat, they took my belt. They even took small pink barrette that I was wearing in my hair. I can only assume that at some point, MacGyver stayed here, and figured out how to kill himself with a small barrette.
Individuality: Taken. It is like high school all over again.
I hear noises from outside the room. People talking in hushed tones, a chair being moved, the sound of something relatively small being dropped on the hard tile floor.
I investigate none of these things. I refuse to make friends with anybody I meet here. I refuse to consider myself part of this world. No. I will make my own progress here. I will progress without the help of people who cannot help me because they cannot help themselves. I do not need other caterpillars to help me emerge from my cocoon. I can become a butterfly on my own.
I lay back down on the bed. Their bed. And dream about butterflies.
Edited by user 02 January 2013 18:03:26(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
