The World is Paused for Me

(Dictated from currently institutionalized comrade)

I remember nothing. 

12 hours ago, I annoyed my brother enough to go get us both milkshakes and we spent the whole hour in line laughing. Now, I am here. In this grey sweaty room. I can feel more then smell the stench of sick. I close my eyes again, curling into my side as if I can just make myself small enough to disappear and leave this room, with the stupid plastic chairs and dirty gray walls behind. Why don’t I remember what happened? Where has that lost time gone? I remember getting into the ambulance. Then rushing–the IV getting put in. But then nothing after that. What happened during those hours? I remember getting taken from one room to another room. And sleeping in the corner because it felt safer at the time. 

There’s just so much time here. Time is currency and it ebbs and flows. Sometimes five minutes is a lifetime because there are only so many things we can do and hear before we go mad. And sometimes an hour is too fast to do anything at all-I understood what he meant about the clocks in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest now. But time does flow. I think the hallway is where time moves and sitting still is where it stops. When I open my door, I let some of the time bleed through. 

We walk. Everyone is always walking. Just pacing and pacing and pacing around the ward. Some of us walk slow–the person who’s foot got broken, and the people with broken hearts. Some of us are too stuck in our despair. Some of us need to outrun it. It’s sitting still that kills our spirits. 

I keep my door open here. That way I can see the coming and going and remember that the world hasn’t stopped for everyone. It’s just paused for me. All the rest of them, the ones moving, they’re in the unpaused part and they can live in and outside of their heads and here I am, sitting in my room eating chocolate ice cream. Stuck. Scared of both my options. Wanting something that I don't know how to express. 

And it’s surreal, to be in this place with all these posters on the walls. The stupid flowers. And think, this is the worst day of their life for so many people. And it’s freeing in some ways, to be around other patients who treat mental illness like it’s the weather. It’s a strange sort of comfortable where you hate everything about this place and at the same time can’t bear leaving. What do you do then?

There’s so much cruelty. The nurse put me in seclusion for self harming again. Later that evening she yelled at me for looking out the window for too long. I can’t keep track of the rules and I think they just keep making up new ones so that they can punish us. 15 minute checks and cameras everywhere makes me feel so paranoid, I can’t sleep because I don’t know what they’re going to do to me. They put me in seclusion for not taking my drugs and they said I’m “noncompliant” (which I think is kind of cool). Another patient gave me a drawing that she made when I came back out of seclusion  and it was so sweet of her. We got in trouble for hugging in the hallway and all I can think is that this is the most cared for I’ve felt the entire time here. 

It is just long. I remember thinking this is like summer camp, except with more rules, no activities, lots of pain and violation and no one wants to be there. But there’s the same sort of energy. It’s a community that’s ephemeral. It can only survive in the moments. When we fuck in the shower or sneak in candy or hug each other outside of the fifteen minute checks. The times we sit next to each other laughing our heads off while trying and failing to play go fish, talking spirituality in the hall, waving and laughing at all the nurses to annoy them. But in those moments it is glorious. There is a certain sense of “we’re all in this together,” that comes close to crossing the line of “we’re all stuck with each other. It feels like we’re meant to be here for some reason and on bad days it feels like we’re just here to annoy each other. But there is this sense of real community/ We’ve all seen shit. We all know that. 

Sometimes all there is to do is to lie there and count your breaths, and you don’t know what’s harder, the breathing or the counting. The hallways are so long and too short at the same time. Everything is a paradox, you know? Like the days fly by but the minutes last hours.  Everyone complains about how much they want to leave but is fucking terrified of what that means. We all lie to each other and ourselves a million different ways, and the lies change by the minute. I think a lot here. The halls are too short. And too long at the same time. I’m starting to feel a little empty. There’s a space in my chest that hurts.