Seth watches me shiver and hug myself, sliding my fingers over shoulders and forearms.
“It was real right?” I ask.
“Yes” he answers.
I’m wearing a hospital gown, hair up in a horrible bun, pale-skinned, suicidal—or so I said. The nurse checks my pulse for the second time. A breakfast tray sits on a stainless-steel surface near my bed surrounded by plastic tubing, plastic buttons, and little lights. I ask Seth to hand me the orange juice. He grabs the cup and fits it with a straw, passes it to me. I drink, then pass it back empty and Seth places it on the tray, “Want anything else?”
“No,” I answer.
Nurses and intake specialists rattle by with medical equipment and clipboards. “It really happened, didn’t it?” I ask.
“Yes.” Seth endures my ghost. The room is cold; no logic invested in the creation of the hospital gown. Paper-thin, nearly gauze. Worn on the body, it’s equivalent to placing a napkin over a hot dinner and expecting it to retain its heat. I ask for more blankets, then more, and accumulate about ten. But still, I’m cold, not sure whether the chill is coming from the outside, or inside—all my nerves tightly bundled together for warmth while the blood in my veins courses like a mountain stream after winter when the water is icy and gushing stealthily between rocks.
Seth jokes that he thought I’d be more dolled up, as I usually am, undoubtedly trying to undo the tension in the room and make light of the grey hue in my lips.
It is winter outside, my mind passing through walls, or time, maybe the future too. Steam rises from a plate of barbeque chicken and baked potatoes on a dinner table, everything set out neatly for Sunday dinner as the family gathers around to pray. I reach for a piping hot roll with my hand, hungry, clawing the air in front of me for nearly 20 seconds before I realize I’m imagining the scene. I stop and looks over at Seth, “Sometimes it feels like I’m in a different place.”
He smiles.
“Can you hand me the orange juice again?”
“It’s gone”
“Oh yeah.” The pile of blankets buries my 90 lb. frame. “Do you think I’ll get better Seth?”
“You will,” he answers with trained confidence so obviously unsure of itself.
The attendants huddling at the nurses’ station become more roaringly noticeable as they pass stories and jokes between them and laugh. They probably think I’m suicidal because it’s the holidays.
**
I’m strapped to a gurney and shipped thirty miles away just as the sun pretends to warm the outside world. It’s 5 AM. The ambulance gurney ushers me through the doors at the hospital’s mental unit and I peel off the thin hospital gown, shower, then slip into a pair of black sweats and a nightshirt before wrapping my freshly washed body and wet hair into the covers and comfort of a hospital bed letting myself feel safe for a minute long enough to soothe myself to sleep not caring if the sleep consumes me, even claims me. Two hours later I am jostled awake by the sound of a wonky IV poll on wheels and a nurse informing me that breakfast is served. The nurse starts her shift at 6AM so she explains that I’ve only slept an hour and the nurse tells me I can return to sleeping after she draws blood and checks me pulse.
The nurse draws my blood and checks my pulse. I go back to sleep. Around noon the nurse returns and knocks sharply on my door to announce that lunch is served in the cafeteria if I’m hungry. I make my way down the corridor to the cafeteria. Lunch is an assortment of cafeteria quality items, most of which I don’t eat, and a cup of horrid coffee, most of which I drink. The woman across the table from me introduces herself as the sister of a woman across the room who is not her sister and whose name would change frequently throughout my visit. The woman also explains that the food here is so much better than the food at the hospital she just came from.
“They don’t know what to do with me,” the woman giggles, “I’m crazy.” She gets up and walks over to another patient, poking at him as he eats, “You look like my uncle,” the woman says, then “You are my uncle! Hey Uncle Adam!”
Pretending not to notice, I pick through my tray of food some more.
“You gonna eat that?” Another woman at my table points to the cookie on my tray, eyeing it suspiciously.
“No, you can have it.”
This woman reaches over quickly and snatches the cookie, holds it to her breast, then deposits it on her tray, staring at me—suspiciously.
“I know you,” the woman says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, you were with my momma when the master came.”
“Mmmm,” I don’t really know how to respond to this.
“I knoooooow you,” the woman points her wide finger with its long poorly manicured nail in my direction, then pulls the cookie to her lips and begins nibbling at it slowly, all the while eyeing me. I smile back to dismiss myself, then gather my tray and deposit it on the dirty tray rack, then leave the dining room, still tired. A middle-aged man paces the hallway with a Bible open in his hand. He mumbles scriptures to himself, utilizing the full length of the hall. Tall, his long strides make the distance seem miniature. He has dimpled cheeks and buzzed hair, deep black agitated eyes. His hands shake. He passes by, acknowledging my presence still mumbling to himself from a passage in 1 Kings. I continue down the hall toward my room. The lights in my room are intrusive. I keep all of them off except the two dim ones over my bed where I sit to collect my thoughts before group session starts in less than twenty minutes.
The ward is a flat silence of medical proclivity. If all the clanging and footprints ceased, there would persist a much larger noise, like the hallow inhale a tornado subsumes from the atmosphere before its debut. I think best in silence, but not this kind. Still, my brief incarceration is reassuring—nothing from the outside can come into this space. Nothing that could kill me or scream out my insides.
**
When I first arrived at the hospital, I looked like a dead aunt’s sad ghost, my hair bobbing its little ball atop my head, stringy pieces protruding everywhere. No one commented on whether I had managed to pull off the sexy-silver-screen-hospital-patient-blonde-bombshell or pale-hung-over-college-freshman-Sunday-morning-rolling-off-the-bed.
I had, at least, in my 1 AM confusion, managed to pack a small bag of clothes and toiletries as I knelt before large Tupperware containers of sweaters, t-shirts, jeans, sweatpants, yoga wear, etc. asking myself over and over aloud what do I need?, flipping through the folded stacks in the bins and attempting to coordinate a few outfits. I was living in the basement of someone I barely knew, a yogi willing to facilitate “this part of my journey,” which I knew would soon need to end. She gave me a mattress, carpeted floors, a bathroom, incense burning, and heat. In my condition, I would have otherwise been shaking in the back of my Jeep, parked somewhere along the highway, completely terrified and having no ability to comprehend where I was or what I should do next. My cognitive functions, typically bright and confident, had dulled to the slow grind of a manual pencil sharpener that is constantly chewing up the pencil lead, while my chemical levels seemed to ebb and flow in the reenactment of a train wreck for six consecutive months—cumulatively gaining force and reducing function, with no break. Nearly homeless, the yogi took me in, no questions asked, so I could “work this out”—whatever it was.
But I couldn’t work it out. Instead, I pack the bag, zipper myself into a long thick puffer jacket, and step out into the well-below-zero winter night, listening as Siri guides me: turn left at W. Maple, walk thirty feet, turn right, the few blocks to the emergency room. There, I drop my bags at the front desk and say, “If you send me home tonight, I will kill myself.” The only way they will let me in.
Frozen and desperate, I am swiftly led to a hospital room, asked to strip off all my clothing and don a hospital gown. Mission accomplished.
**
By 9 AM the next morning, Bibleman is pacing up and down the corridor mumbling scriptures to himself, utilizing the full length of the hall.
A psychiatrist enters my room and reaches to turn on the light. No! I exclaim as the psychiatrist nears the switch. I roll to my right and select the switch for the dimmer lights on the wall, other side of my bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired.”
“Didn’t sleep well?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“There was a lot of noise in the hallway all night. I kept getting woke up by slamming doors and conversation.”
“I see. I’ll prescribe a sleeping pill for tonight.”
“Ok.”
The psychiatrist asks routine questions about how I feel and what my plans are upon release. Emotionally reserved, she is steady as the tick of a wall clock, monotone, predictable, and uninfluential to say the least—but kind.
“Tests show that your serotonin is low,” she continues, “your official diagnosis is PTSD. I will write you a script. Take the pills for at least six weeks to see results. You can take it longer if you want, but six weeks should do it.” The psychiatrist gets up and leaves with “See you tomorrow.”
**
“Tell them you’re suicidal,” my instructor told me. I’d been enrolled in a low-res MFA program for a year now and she’s one of the few people I trusted. “They will have to let you in.” A psych ward is the last place I ever envisioned myself at any point in my lifetime. Smart and talented growing up, I was, at very least, destined to do better than my family’s economic demographic.
And I did; I married up.
After the psychiatrist’s second visit to my room the next day, I wrap a blanket over my shoulders and walk down the hall to the phone on the wall and call him, my ex. “You did this to me,” I tell him with barely enough emotional energy to show I’m angry. He doesn’t agree. “You’re not my responsibility anymore,” he responds, as if I ever was.
“Serotonin,” the psychiatrist had explained, “is needed to process old memories and make new.” This, she said, is the reason I forgot how to drive my Jeep, forcing me to walk to the emergency room in ten degrees below zero. This, she explained, is the result of long-term exposure to abuse.
This, I understand, is why I can’t really describe what my ex had done to me all those years—only that he had done it. Only that it was abuse.
My instructor, it turns out, was right. They had to let me in for at least three days, the only way I would ever be able to see—to afford—a psychiatrist. But I wasn’t suicidal, not yet anyway. It would take years to accomplish this fact, the betrayals of those surrounding my life—family, friends, other men, institutions—strengthening my ex-husband’s long-term statements about my worth, experiences he himself would validate four years in the future when tells me he was aware of the awful things he was doing to me during our marriage—the violence, the gaslighting, the lying, the rage—but that he didn’t know what his behavior was doing to me, how it was destroying my mind.
And then he will add, “I should be in jail for this.” I’ll be packing my car again when he tells me trying, again, to leave Michigan with no destination in mind. We will hug. It will feel good, and sick. Confusing. He will be sorry—as much as he can be. I’ll be the sanest person any therapist seems to have ever seen in their office and I have earned my MFA.
**
Later that afternoon, I sit in the TV room with Bibleman watching Golden Girls, noticing that his knees never stop bouncing and his hands shake. I, on the other hand, am just starting to feel relaxed.
“I’ve done a lot of bad things,” he confesses to me suddenly, “used a lot of women, done a lot of drugs, drank a lot. I’ve lived a bad life.”
“You read the Bible a lot too,” I finally respond.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’ve got the Holy Ghost. I’m going to die.” He clenches and unclenches his hands.
“Why are you going to die?”
“I want to.”
“Why do you want to?”
“To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. I’m going to stand before the judgment seat of Christ.”
“Does this comfort you?”
“Yes, I’m going to die soon.”
I take a sip of the horrible brown decaf liquid the hospital serves from a dispenser in the mini kitchen. Other than the coffee, my stay here has been more than tolerable: a nurturing staff, safe environment, and few expectations.
“How do you know you are going to die?” I ask, incredibly curious but half preoccupied with an adult coloring page and five different shades of green.
“I don’t know. I just am.”
He smiles, deepening the dimples in his cheeks.
“So, you’re not actually dying, you just want to?’
“Yes.” He has the most beautiful smile.
“I think you should live,” I respond.
“But to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. I have the Holy Ghost.”
“I’m sure you do. But you could be with God while in the body.”
He gives this a moment’s consideration, then “I don’t see any point in staying in the body.”
“Why?”
“Do you believe it’s the last days?” He looks at her inquisitively.
“I don’t know,” I respond slowly, “A lot of people have thought that they lived in the last days for a very long time—even since Bible times. I’m not sure it’s helpful to focus on the end. It seems better to use the time you have here in the best way possible.”
“I’ve done a lot of bad things,” he repeats.
“I know. You said.”
After a few blank minutes interrupted only by the fidget of Bibleman’s unsettled hands, I exit with good night and walk back toward my room not knowing this conversation will become costly in just a few weeks when he finds me on social media and begins to stalk me through various outlets for the next three years offering to eat out my vagina and marry me repeatedly.
The hallway glows like the inside of a CT scanner with its white walls, glossy tile floor, and halogen lights.
**
“You’re the sanest person that has ever come through my office doors,” the psychiatrist says during my final evaluation. I’ve already begun the serotonin and can feel it’s dizzying affects. “What is your plan now?” she asks, methodically.
The state will pay for three days in a unit for anyone like me who doesn’t have an income to boast of. My three days was up. “I don’t have one,” I say, quite literally unsure where I will go after my hospital stay. “I don’t have money,” I say.
The psychiatrist doesn’t look up from the notes she is writing. “You have ten dollars,” she comments. Yes, I have ten dollars.
**
Bibleman is walking the halls again, reciting. I cross after he clears my path and reach for the phone on the wall, the only phone patients are allowed to use. I call my dad.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“Oh, my sinuses are acting up again and I’m having some back pain.”
“Ah.”
“Where are you now?”
“In Michigan at the hospital.”
“Why are you there?”
“Because I’m sick dad. The things my ex did to me have made me very sick. I’m not functioning well. I need help.”
Pause. “I see.” Pause. “Well, I can’t really help you.” Pause.
“I must come to you. Live with you. I have nowhere else to go and I’m sick.”
“You can’t come here. I have to take care of your moth—”
“I have nowhere to go. I’m your daughter.”
Pause.
“You can’t stay with your sister?”
“No.”
“I guess if you have to come here.”
“I do.”
“When are you coming?”
“In two days.”
“Ok. See you soon”
“Yep,” I say, “See you in a few days.”
Bibleman walks the length of the hallway and walks back. Looks up at me slightly still reciting scripture.
I head back to my room, start gathering my things. Sleep. Wake up. Call Seth and ask him to pick me up tomorrow and take me back to the yogi’s house. Seth arrives the next day at 2pm and takes me back to the yogi’s house. A longtime friend, he can’t help me anymore either, he will tell me. Something about his wife. Something about insecurity. Something about how pretty I am. The local shelter had already turned me down too. Something about my college education. “You have a master’s degree,” they said, to also say women like me don’t get rooms. “We have to keep them for the desperate ones.”
Seth drops me off in front of the yogi’s house and I go in shaking. By the next day, when the yogi leaves early to visit with family, I’m shaking so violently I can’t get up off her couch for even a bit of food. I’m alone; I can’t think much beyond the moment I’m in but she’s ready for me to leave her place and begin the next leg of “my journey.” I will go to my dad’s tiny apartment in Texas tomorrow. I won’t be able to stay there either nearly long enough.
I lie on the faux leather sofa wrapped in as many blankets as I can find, my lips pale and shivering, medication taking full effect. It’s December 25. Drenched in cold sweat and guilt-ridden, I realize I am the oldest sibling in my family and it’s the holidays; I haven’t wished anyone in my family a happy holiday. How will they feel?
Shaking, I look for my brother’s number in my phone.
“What do you want?” he answers.
Confused pause.
“To wish you a happy holiday.”
I don’t recall the rest of the conversation. The next day, still shaking, I pack my Jeep in the frigid air and bright sun and drive eighteen hours to Texas. No stops. I don’t remember driving.
