by Remy Spencer
Talk about trips to the mental ward with unaffected indifference, representative of a real, honest-to-God lack of feeling about it one way or the other, even as Mark's looking at me with naked sympathy, which is funny as hell in its own right, because it was never like a goddamn Hilton, but we've both sure as shit had worse. And speaking relative to mental wards, there's worse ways for them to be than a week without a phone or a day and change without a jacket. He's still weirdly upset about it on my behalf, like the thought of my being cold or having my nipples rubbed raw by a hospital gown is an unconscionable slight, like he didn't spend an undisclosed to me chunk of time in one of those wilderness survival, teen training type camps.
"The second time, in group therapy, one of the old guys said it was the first time he'd ever felt cared about." I say, not insistent or anything, but like relaying an interesting piece of trivia. He was anywhere from a hard forty to a soft seventy, and in the loose handful of memories I kept from that time, that was one I'd decided to cling to. It went against my own juvenile biases, that these places could actually be healing, for some people.
The first time I was admitted for threatening to off myself, the second time for nearly succeeding. Now, trading a joint back and forth on Mark's filthy couch in Mark's filthy apartment, the scar stands white and obvious on my left forearm, like a teenage girl's drawing of an eye, complete with lashes where I'd let the stitches sit too long, and the doctor had had to take the snipping tool under the skin to get them free.
I really, truly, don't understand why my descriptions seem to turn Mark's stomach the way that they are. I think they're kind of funny, or at least absurd; trying to break the crust on peach cobbler with a square of cardboard folded up in the approximate shape of a spoon, because we couldn't be trusted to not snap plastic utensils in half and shove them bloodily into our jugular veins. The main injustice, in my eyes, was having to ask to use chapstick, and then being accompanied to my locker by a nurse, who would unlock the thing and watch me smear the lip balm on, and this was only when they'd had the nurse to spare. If I could kill myself with a chapstick, they ought to have let me do it. These don't read like jokes when I tell them to Mark; I'm reminded then that for all the places he's been, a mental hospital hasn't been one of them. I have a leg up on him, in that respect. We all have fantastical ideas about things we've never experienced, but it was, above everything else, fucking boring. Watching Flavor of Love reruns on a mounted CRT in a plastic prison cage; controlling the radio during musical chairs and refusing to shut it off because House of the Rising Sun was playing and I hadn't heard music in six days; playing musical chairs at all, like kindergarteners and not teenagers waiting out a clock until we're let out and left alone too long.
The first time was an adolescent ward, mostly a junk drawer for foster kids in or in-between abusive homes. One girl had taken paperclips and chunks of wood to her forearm, gouged deep enough for stitches, so maybe locking up my chapstick came from experience. The second time I was the youngest by 15 years in a rehab-turned-mental hospital, with the arm gash and the old guy who liked being there so much.
"You're not allowed to wear street clothes the first couple days." I tell Mark, who's rolling a third joint in pink paper. He's smoking like this because he hates himself when he's sober but won't drink in the afternoon when I'm there, from a day late and a dollar short sense of shame.
"Seriously?" he says back.
"Yeah. I dunno why. They take your laces and all that when you do get your clothes. never figured it out."
I didn't stay long enough on the adult ward to get street clothes back. The paper gown was itchy and sandpapered the skin clean off my nipples. I didn't get a jacket, either, just a blanket. The skin around my mouth turned dry and red and irritated in the cold air, and I couldn't get enough access to my chapstick to make any headway on healing it. I checked myself out after a day and half, and rode home in the passenger seat of the patient transport van. I wouldn't remember, for years, why I had taken the patient transport van.
Mark's indignant about the chapstick thing, and the jacket, and I think that's kind of cute.
"It's really not that bad." I tell him, because it isn't. I've got a habit of forgetting pain once I've stopped feeling it, and a lot of things seem funnier in hindsight. Negative emotions register in extremes, everything else with indifference. I'd screamed at the receptionist that if she didn't let me leave I'd jump over the desk and gouge her fucking eyes out. I impart this to Mark like I'm telling a mildly entertaining anecdote.
"And they didn't fucking sedate you?" Mark asks.
"I'm 5'4 and I'm white. And the place wasn't that bad."
I'd also forgotten that I'd called my brother when I was bleeding out, spread out on my bedroom floor like making a snow angel. I was admitted right before Thanksgiving; one of my handful of memories is another patient looking out the floor to ceiling windows in the lobby, at a cascade of snow, and yelling, "We're gonna have a white Thanksgiving!" The first time I was admitted was near Halloween, and the nurses had us paint pumpkins. Crafts are an integral part of rehabilitating suicidal children.
I'd forgotten I'd called my brother for the same reason I'd forgotten why I took the transport van, for mostly the same reason I'd tried to unzip the bluest vein in my forearm, for pretty much the same reason I was in either hospital in the first place, but none of this reads as funny and it won't make Mark's misplaced sympathy gratifying.
I tell him about peach cobbler and jackets and playing musical chairs because my mom told me she couldn't handle me anymore and she wouldn't hug me before she left the hospital aren't jokes and veer dangerously away from indifference.
The memories are piecemeal; I'm on the floor, deep pain unfolding from the center of the cut into the muscle of my arm and up to my shoulder. I hadn't thought it would hurt the way it did; I don't call an ambulance; I'm pressing a red hand towel to the wound and my mom is tight-lipped driving me to the hospital; I'm accepting a turkey sandwich too cheerfully and I can tell it makes my mom upset but I don't really understand why; the light outside my room at the hospital is turning pale blue and I'm crying myself to sleep.
"I watched Mean Girls for the first time when I was at the kid hospital."
Mark's rolling another joint and I want to tell him I'm good but I haven't got a lot going for me besides an unexpected ability to take down drugs and alcohol. Already I've had a joint and half (adjusted for passing) and I feel very little besides stupid.
"There was this big binder with laminated pictures of all the video tapes and DVDs they had. We watched Mean Girls and Secondhand Lions, and The Fault in Our Stars, but I straight up refused to watch that one. I sat in the hallway the whole time."
Again, there's something to be said about the weird dichotomy of it, the reasons we were all there versus what we did when we arrived. Playing musical chairs with a girl you know is gonna be raped as soon as they send her home. There are worse things than being bored. Maybe that's what pisses Mark off. Bodily autonomy is contingent upon the willingness to keep yourself alive; if you can't manage that, they take your fucking shoelaces.
I took a timed shower (literally, the water would shut itself off after ten minutes) my first morning on the adult ward, arm stuck out of the side to keep my cellophaned stitches dry. Mark doesn't think that this is very funny either.
They send a nurse to check on you if you're in the bathroom too long, like you could get past the cardboard utensils and acrylic mirrors and absence of shoelaces, and slit your wrists with playing cards or swallow marker caps if you're left unattended. One of the girls learned to play gin from a nurse who quit before she got discharged.
"We weren't allowed to touch each other." I say, finally getting sort of mad. "I get that we can't fuck, but if a girl's parents are coming to pick her up, I'm gonna give her a hug."
It's not the lack of autonomy; you expect it. You had autonomy, and look where it got you. It's the lack of gravitas, of weight, appropriate solemnity with regards to your and everyone else's situation. The knowledge that this is the best anyone has yet to come up with. You slit your wrists and it gets you coloring pages and musical chairs and arts and crafts. A girl getting sent back to her foster home to be raped. Aging methheads who haven’t spent one moment of their lives feeling cared about. My mom not picking up the phone when I called from the hospital. Etc, etc. I only saw a therapist once in a cumulative eight and a half days - what better indication than that, that it's meant to be a distraction? Help is a happy accident. You're getting stuck in the vegetable crisper until you calm down.
"That's fucking stupid man. What, you're not supposed to make friends?" Mark asks.
"No. We weren't allowed to exchange phone numbers or anything."
I still traded numbers with the girl who dug paperclips and wood into her arm. We only kept in contact for a day. I hope she's doing well.
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