This is for the people I shared seventy-two long hours with
We’d never met before nor would we ever meet again
None of us wanted to be trapped within those white, white walls
Yet we were all hiding from something out there, too
This is for them: the crazy, the broken, the silenced
This is for the roommate I got on my second night, first full night
She was blonde, maybe forty, and if we weren’t in a psych ward
I think she might have been pretty
But we were
And she looked like death
She was detoxing from a drug cocktail from nightmares
And neither of us slept
Since they had to check on us every five minutes
With lights in our faces all night
The same drugs that got her here killed her boyfriend
But she was here to tell me the tale
And we swapped our stories, and she said,
“Oh, honey, you don’t belong in here,”
And she told me that I had things waiting for me outside these white, white walls,
That I should listen to my parents,
And if I wanted to write, then maybe I should write
(And I am)
But no matter what, and I followed this advice, too,
“Don’t touch drugs, and don’t come back.”
This is for the girl with the dark, glossy, staring eyes
That might sound bleak, but she was always smiling, giggling
Her mind was somewhere else, like mine
She was schizophrenic, too,
She’d been there a while,
She told us in a group session that she fell in love with the boy only in her mind
That she believed he would want the best for her, even if it meant his demise
But she just wasn’t so sure she wanted to give him up
And I told her I had friends only in my mind, too
And that maybe the ones we really love never truly leave us, real or not real
And medication didn’t have to take that away from her
That he’d still be there if she wanted him, but only if she wanted him
But so would the real world now, if she wanted it
And later, I told myself that when I went back on meds,
This thing I said first just to comfort her,
But at that moment, she giggled again, and looked at peace, and said,
“Thank you.”
This is for the boy who talked nonstop
He had a sweet, sweet car and a sweet, sweet girl
He couldn’t wait to get out and see them both
He told us this over and over and over
And there probably was no car
And there probably was no girl
But God, it was nice to live in his world for a second
He smiled every day over a breakfast a saint couldn’t eat
And didn’t mind that you couldn’t truly use the bathrooms alone
He was a regular, knew all the staff’s first names
But didn’t look over at the sound of his own
And he told us how great the world was out there
And I wanted to believe him
And when they let us walk around the gray courtyard in circles
For fifteen precious minutes
Instead of hallways paced so much, all night, they put up signs
Telling you how many laps was a mile
I didn’t go outside, because it was pouring
But he went, and he came back in, soaked, radiant
And I asked about the weather, joking, and he told me:
“It’s so beautiful.”
This is for the one who tried to escape
I saw what he was doing
I cheered him on in my head and looked away,
Don’t give him away,
He crouched down low below the nurse’s station
And quietly bolted after someone into the locked room
The one with the elevators
But he got caught
And all I could think about was what I would’ve done
If I’d done it, made it to the first floor
No shoes, no jacket, no wallet, no keys, no phone
They’d taken all of those things away
I would’ve had only the same clothes I arrived in days ago
I wondered if I could’ve blended in enough to walk out the hospital’s front door
And then gone… where?
And I still ask myself that years later,
And they asked him questions, right then, right there,
In that white, white hall that told you how many times you had to pace them
To get to a mile
(So many)
And, bitter, he told them,
“Well, it was worth a shot.”
This is for someone I don’t know
It was one of us, it could’ve been any of us
But I got to borrow one of the hospital’s tablets
To check my school email
And feel like there was still a world waiting for me outside
And right there in the search history
Was a question we’d all pondered
Yet I couldn’t bring myself to find out the answer
I didn’t want to be a tattle
But I didn’t want to have someone’s life on my conscience
Even though I’d asked myself the same question
And I remembered craving death
The way you’re supposed to crave oxygen
Every second without it throbbing
I swallowed too many of my antidepressants once
I regretted it
I liked to think there really was a worthwhile world out there
So I told the nurses, just in case
The person I didn’t know
Had found the answer to,
“How do you kill yourself in a psych ward?”
This is for the woman who was admitted after me
I overheard them saying she had anger issues, she was delusional
That communication was hard, they said she spoke poor English
She screamed at them that English was her first language,
That they just didn’t like that she had dark skin,
That she wasn’t born here,
That her accent didn’t sound like theirs
She liked to yell and throw and punch
And I was stupid or brave enough to ask her what was wrong once
And she told me she was mad at what the US government had done to her home country in Africa
And I told her that wasn’t so delusional, that she was right to be mad
And for what it was worth, I wasn’t so fond of what they’d done to this country, either
And she took a deep breath and she told me,
“You seem sane. Don’t stop.”
This is for the girl who liked to color with me in silence
We weren’t supposed to talk about where we came from
But I thought I heard her slip and say something about Harvard
It was around midterm time, then, for both of us
She had scars running up her arms that might scare the average soldier
But she made beautiful drawings, with or without lines to color in
And she doodled hearts over those scars until they faded away
She just missed her dog, and her mother’s cooking,
And she had a little sister she was scared would turn out just like her
She didn’t say much, but we’d sharpen our pencils under supervision together
With a cheap little plastic pencil sharpener from a back to school sale
And I mumbled something about the times I’d taken one of those apart because
I had nothing else to take out my self hatred with
In the same breath as complaining about being watched,
And it was sad, unhinged, shameful,
But what really made me not want to do it again
Was when she looked at me with the expression she got
When she talked about not wanting to scar her sister’s wrists
With her own self loathing, and she said,
“Same.”
This is for the people I shared only seventy-two long, unwilling hours with
Complete strangers, yet no matter how different we seemed from each other
We shared how much the rest of the world wanted to lock us away
And how much a part of us wasn’t quite of that world
And we did better united than divided
And if I have to be honest
They sure did me a lot more good than the doctors did.
The Schizophrenia Diaries 