You wake up feeling shitty and take your meds and take a piss with the door open. Some of the nurses turn their heads, but some of them look right at you. You don’t care if they look anymore. Then you go to the morning meeting. The nurse asks to speak to you privately.
“You need to wear a bra.”
“Why? There are only women here.”
“It’s part of the rules to dress appropriately.”
“But what difference does it make?”
“You’re refusing to comply with the rules,” she says, looking down at a clipboard.
“No. Jesus, I’m just trying to figure out what the point is.”
“Go back to your room and put on a bra, or you’re not getting any points for the day.”
You want to say, “Go ahead.” But you’ve learned it’s not worth it. You know when you’re beat. And in this place you’re always going to be the loser. The nurse gets to go home and drink coffee and read books however she wants to. She has a life that is progressing. She gets to be outside. She gets to eat when she feels like eating, sleep when she feels like sleeping. Your life is on pause.
The meds must be doing their magic because you don’t feel emotions that strongly. You don’t cry every night. You stop getting so angry. Thoughts come and register but nothing overwhelms you. There is this weird optimism, and you have no idea what is generating it or where it comes from. It must be the Prozac — a little pill that makes you feel stupidly happy about absolutely nothing.
You spend all of the free time one morning writing a letter to Ogden. You tell him everything. It’s kind of nice to write something longhand. You brought a laptop but aren’t allowed to touch it because it has a camera. They don’t want anyone’s privacy to be violated. They don’t give you your books because you’re supposed to engage with people.
If you ever had any hope that this might not be a total waste of time, you don’t anymore.
There is a young woman who attacked her mother with a knife. There is a woman who lost her kid to cancer and never talks. She’s obviously in some kind of shock. There is a girl who thinks you’re the funniest person in the ward. She’s pretty dumb.
Sometimes it feels like you are being punished, and the real program is to make you so miserable that you don’t try to use or off yourself again because you may fail and have to come back.
That’s pretty much the lesson you take away: next time kill yourself properly, or don’t try.
You have group therapy sessions every morning. You have to go around the room and say how you feel. You can’t say, “Fine.” “Fine” is not a feeling word. They have a chart with feeling words beneath faces expressing the feelings. Scan the chart. Anxious? Optimistic? Enraged? Excited? What is there to be excited about in a place where each day is exactly the same? They probably increase your meds if you say that.
Sometimes you cry and beg the nurses to let you go out and take a walk. Will you please just take me for a walk?
You see people freak the fuck out. One time someone screams at you. Not words. A black girl with hair so short she doesn’t look like a girl stands right in front of you and screams her head off, and you stand there staring, wondering what to do. She could kill you. But then the men in white come and take her away. It doesn’t seem right to lock a human up for being sick, but you can no longer muster a sense of outrage.
There is an attractive man who comes with a woman wearing unflattering clothes; they tell us to write poetry. You plagiarize a Counting Crows song and everyone is impressed.
There is a lot of therapy: group therapy, art therapy, writing therapy, the dreaded music therapy. Some people get into that shit. Some people paint with a fury, or draw maniacally and with great concentration. For a solid hour this one girl takes a piece of white paper and makes it dark black. She uses black crayons and writes with a little-kid scrawl, over and over, and when she finishes, she looks somewhat satisfied, and then she picks up another piece of white paper.
I earn enough points to check out the collected works of Robert Lowell. “I am a thorazined fixture / in the immovable square-cushioned chairs / we preoccupy for seconds like migrant birds.”
I call Ogden from the pay phone, but he doesn’t pick up. He never picks up. I would bet money he was staring at the number and hitting “Ignore.” I would ignore me too. In the message, I try to sound just broken enough for him to care, but also together enough so he isn’t scared I will go batshit crazy on him.
On visiting day, everyone has visitors but me. It’s not like I wanted to see my mother, but not having visitors is annoying. Just sitting there trying to read while overhearing parents trying to force small talk. Keisha’s cousins have bright sneakers and sneak in food: candy and chicken and soda. The nurses never come in during visiting hours.
Ogden calls. He tells me he’s glad I’m getting help. He says he knows it must suck. He says he’s proud of me. He gives me some perspective. This is only a stop. Life will go on. I ask him if he misses me, and he says, “Sure.” I can tell he wants to get off the phone. It always feels like there is this meter ticking that runs out before I’m done telling him what I want.
When I get off the phone, I feel sadder than I did before I spoke to him. I looked forward to things like phone calls, and now the call came and went and it wasn’t much of anything. I try to call him back, but it goes straight to voicemail. Seven minutes is the exact amount of time he will allow you to waste with your bullshit.
He approached friendship like it was something to check off the list. Call Maya in the loony bin. Take out the garbage.
Some of these broken women talk in whispers about changing their lives. Some of them act all tough and defiant. They are young, and I want to tell them there is no one they are rebelling against.
Keisha writes like a school kid. She is trying to write a letter to a judge to get her daughter back. I sit down at her desk and take out a piece of paper. Her daughter was taken away because someone called Child Protective Services when Keisha’s boyfriend was slinging weed out of their apartment, but he’s gone now. Keisha tells me she’s been clean and sober for five years. She couldn’t take living without her kid, though, so one night she got in a fight with her mother and threw a bottle and then used the shards to slice her arm open. I can’t imagine her doing this. She seems like the type to eat and lie around on the couch, like she lies around in bed here, just looking at magazines. They get on her for not showering, but she says she likes baths.
I’ve never seen her cry. I’ve seen everyone else cry. I have heard her laugh. She has a great laugh.
I offer to write the letter for her. I spend days on it. I write it and revise it a million times. It feels good to be useful.
Give me new problems. I’m tired of the same old problems.
Why can’t someone interest me in my own life?
She tells me I wrote an awesome letter. It makes me feel good to see her smile and look like she has something to be excited about. I wish I could do more. She shows me pictures of a little girl with ribbons in her hair. This, she tells me, is the only reason she has for living.
Keisha and I stay up in the dark. She tells me about how her uncle had molested her. I feel like I can help her. I talk to her about getting her GED. I say I can tutor her.