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There is liberation in being in a loony bin. There isn’t anything else to fear. Hello, bottom, nice to meet you. Sometimes it feels exactly right. When there is a tray of food in front of me, I eat it. I wear boring, clean clothes. I listen more than I talk. I let the structure lead me through the day. I don’t use my brain. I don’t focus on my emotions. I am a blank slate. Everything begins here. And if I get to read a book, it will be a good day. To be able to lie in bed with my bare feet swaying.
I don’t want the nurses and the doctors to know, but in my head, I begin to make plans. I want to go back to school. I want to do everything exactly right. It isn’t fear of coming back here so much as I don’t want my life to stop again. No more time-outs.
At night I get used to screams just as I got used to sirens in the city; the noise registers but fails to alarm anymore.
I no longer feel that crazy sense of empathy every time I hear the metal door to the quiet room close, primarily because I’ve witnessed enough insane temper tantrums that made me want to throw people in there myself. How hard is it to shut the fuck up while people are trying to sleep?
At least I left everyone alone. At least I was quiet when I was doing my dying.
Sometimes a tiny little scream rises inside me, and I muffle it with a pillow. I tell myself I have to be the sane one in here. I have to fold my clothes. I have to shower every morning. I have to put all my books in alphabetical order, be steady, and act like all of this is very much beneath me. No, I am not crazy. My secret fantasy is not about the day I can have my own fucking bathroom where I cut up my arms as much as want.
The woman who lost her son. I have to act like she doesn’t have all the reason in the world to be fucking nuts.
After three weeks, they let me go home for a weekend.
My aunt and my mother pick me up. My aunt says, “Look at you. You’ve lost weight since I’ve seen you. You look like a boy.”
I just shake my head. Then she grabs my wrist and says, “What did you do?” Her face changes from a smirk to a nasty look of disapproval. “You know your mother cried?” She doesn’t seem to care about the nurse sitting right across from us, who looks up as my aunt’s voice rises. I understand the way people view this: me fucking with my mom.
The weekend consists of going to different relatives’ houses, eating a lot of food, and lying about all the positive things I’m excited about. I talk about finishing my thesis. I talk about getting my PHD. Everybody is so encouraging; I almost kind of start believing in this future too. Nobody brings up Peter. Do they think it’s not a big deal, or is it because they think it’s too big a deal?
Back on the ward, more of the same. They finally tell me that in a few weeks, I’ll be released. I don’t feel like I’m ready.
I’m not sure why they are releasing me. It’s been almost two months. I stopped trying to get points long ago. I feel comfortable in the routine. I no longer lie in bed wide-awake all night crying. I have stopped thinking of ways to torture my mother forever for putting me in a psychiatric ward. Each morning I look forward to breakfast and then breeze through group therapy (which is more like taking attendance in elementary school than actual therapy), sometimes offering a story from my childhood but mostly letting other people talk. I tried and failed to start a journal, but I enjoy reading again and love the hour before dinner. The nurses are no longer evil bitches controlling my life; they’re part of the background, daily annoyances I’ve learned to put up with. I have started hating the patients who won’t fall in line. I look at them in the same way I remember other patients had looked at me, like, “It isn’t that hard. Just shut up, and do what you’re told.”
What would life on the outside be like? Fear. Dread. I’ve been a mouse in a cage. A girl taking a time-out. I don’t trust myself. The world and the men and the drugs. The way the whole day would be free, not broken up into mindless activities for me to navigate. I could start out slowly: doing my laundry, keeping my room clean, writing at night, making myself part of the world again. I would look back at this as the nasty ending to a bad patch. I would make myself breakfast. I would make my bed. I would talk to my mother daily. I would go to job interviews. I would spend a few hours a day working on my thesis at the coffee shop. I would be one of those women at the coffee shop, sipping a coffee, laptop open, looking serious and productive. I would take meds every day that would keep me steady, and have a quiet, simple life. Or I wouldn’t. I would get out and just fuck everything up again. I run my hand against the wall. Keisha laughs at something in a magazine. The bed suddenly feels comfortable, and I curl up in a fetal position. Dear world, I’m sorry, but I don’t know if I will ever be the kind of person who can live with you.
* * *
Back in the city, I listen to Lou Reed. I write, drink tons of coffee. I stay up all night because I don’t need sleep, don’t need food. All the weight I put on at the nut house has fallen off me. Not long after I came back, I got lonely, and now Elizabeth’s friend Val stays at my place. He gave me two hundred bucks. He said he would give me a hundred a week but is full of excuses and barely pays me. But he does clean and that’s nice.
After a while, I stop taking my antidepressants because they make it so I can’t come. What’s more depressing than that?
My mind races. My body is shrinking. I walk to the train. Hear the National Geographic narrator, Human beings do not procreate as much as other species, but their ability to use tools and adapt to their environments, coupled with their long lives, make them one of the worst types of existing infestations. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of them. Look at this one here; he’s made a nest out of a bench other humans have made for sitting. Look at this one mama human with her two little chicks, all clothed in the feathers of dead birds to keep warm during the winter months. Humans have a slight fur covering their entire bodies, long silky hair on the tops of their heads and around their pubis. They sustain themselves on animal protein from the farms they house to grow and breed their prey.
Mania is fucking amazing. I talk forever.
I go on craigslist to get another date.
The john dresses like a hipster and claims to be a musician. He’s cool. Maybe in his forties. I am three hours late, and he doesn’t even care. “I had to see how that movie Flight ended,” I explain. He laughs. We go walk around. As a way of checking him out, I had suggested getting something to eat. He says there’s a twenty-four-hour diner nearby, but I feel good about him, so we go back to his place. It’s the first apartment in the city I’ve been to with wall-to-wall carpeting.
“I feel like we’re in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest.”
“Ouch!” he says, pouring a glass of wine.
“Oh my god!”
“What?”
“We have the same towels!” I realize that I come off way too excited about this.
“Target?”
“Yup.”
He sits down next to me, and we talk forever. We talk about how BBC shows are better than American TV. We talk about how in England they don’t feel the need for every character to look like a model; the actors there look like real people. We talk about how he’s never been married or lived with anyone. He talks about how unfair it would be to have a girlfriend when he’s always on the road. We talk about moving all the time and being an army brat. I like him. It feels easy.