TW: Suicidal thoughts
The things on the unit would certainly have stories to tell if they could tell them. Consider the phone, dangling on a painfully short cord. It slowly drifts, back and forth, in the tight confines of a doorless booth. It is located on the perimeter of the main unit. It is not exactly the place for the most private of conversations.
For their part, the patients that come and go do not seem universally concerned with whether anyone can hear them or not. One evening a patient sobs uncontrollably. You see their hands, sweating, clutched for life around a receiver that couldn’t possibly fall to the floor. You fight the urge to listen in, but it’s really, really hard. There’s not much to do here, and you can sense the pain oozing out of that booth.
In the end do you do not tune in.
When your mind melts down in a scalding, unmanageable cauldron of emotions, you really don’t pay mind to who is in the room either. Everything disappears. There is only the booth, the phone, and a layer cake of distress, depression, and anxiety. You have sat, evening after evening this week, wondering what all of the distress is about half the time, hoping that you can keep your literal cool together when you have to get on the phone.
You rarely can, especially when you hear the voices of your children. They sound impossibly far away when you are 11 stories up and behind a maze of hallways and double doors.
Watch out for that elopement risk on entry!
Seriously; imagine the stories these phones could tell; they are the world’s highest concentrations of pain. You have never seen a piece of plastic absorb so much distress. As you watch patients, hunched over, forms lost in the wrinkled mess of hospital gowns, you think that this phone has to stop working at some point. Even something as simple as a phone can only take so much.
You sit in your favorite chair. Scattered chips from a forgotten card game sit before you, along with your book. You want to read but the emotions are too high right now.
You have been prevented from truly reading for a very long time, and you’re reminded of this again.
The chair is soft and much too big for you but remember: nobody needs death by chair in this place. Sure something more elegant and honorable would be better.
You think about all of the people who have come and gone from that chair. An ancestor of yours may have sat in this very chair and slept in the very same bed, but you think not. The lifeless bed you sleep on, more like a shipping container really, could not possibly have been the first bed. You think on this ancestor, your heart full of longing, and you whisper “I love you, I miss you.”
You think of your first time in that chair, sobbing uncontrollably, trying to make the floor attendant feel good about their ramshackle one on one therapy. You wonder how many people have sat in that chair, like you, stripped of everything, eagerly wishing to die under the weight of it all. When you sat in that chair you certainly thought yes, it would be a nice idea if you ceased to exist; this is your ideal scenario in that moment: everything goes on the same, but nobody has a memory of you at peak awful or at all. That would, you think, be lovely.
But such a heavy thing to think!
How much of this weight has been in that chair? You can’t imagine it, and you’re grateful that objects can’t absorb all of their histories.
Objects really can’t absorb traumatic histories, right?
In front of you, a cable drama about first responders plays. You generally consider the scripts for such shows to be worthless, but you notice that the patients around the TV are locked in. You are grateful that they have something interesting to hold their attention. Connect Four and coloring books can only go so far, and the reading materials are largely adolescent fantasy novels, usually with something like books 3 and 7 of a 12 book series available for your reading pleasure.
Seriously, wait until you see the bill for this place. When you do, it will all make sense to you.
There’s something lovely about this moment; nobody is talking. Everyone is, while locked up in this place, deeply, earnestly trying to be somewhere else. Even if that somewhere else is the fictionalized version of a gruesome and fatal car wreck.
Some places are better than functional prisons.
It is time for lights out eventually, so you go to bed. In there is a white wall, as plain as can be. There is nothing to look at, and you suddenly think that it would be wonderful if there were murals in here; stories of despair and suffering for people both simultaneously sick and ashamed of their capacity to breathe. There are probably reasons not to do this, you muse, thinking of the evils of drawstrings and pens in hard casings. There's probably danger in a picture, too. Who knows .
You sit in your bed, in the dark. The wall is a glowing white now under a clouded moon. What will this wall absorb from you and your stories? What will your bed tell the next person?
You clutch your history book and close your eyes. You signed your against medical advice formal several days ago, signaling that you wish to leave. You decide that you aren’t going to leave any pain behind in this place.
You’re going to kill and bury it when it is.
Good night.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
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