Chapter 14 - nature

Zack's POV:

During the week i've been in this hospital, i have learnt three things.

1. It really really hurts when you cut your wrists. Like unimaginably, every single day. You can't move without it feeling like the stitches are going to burst, but i'll try not to get too graphic.

2. How quickly you go from trying to maintain that you don't need help, to doing everything they offer you without a second thought. Even though i am out of my mind on numbing medication, i can feel a small part of me which wants to get better. I had it last time, too. But that didn't last for every long, and i don't entirely count on this one too either.

And finally, 3. The amount of thinking time you get. To ponder everything in your brain. Yes, granted, the pill help to quiet any thoughts, but my thoughts are still all there, just a little bit dimmer. It takes time to reach them, but once i do there's no going back.

I've thought about Amelia from the second i woke up. I was originally in the main part of the hospital, where i had the surgery to piece me back together again. Then, two or three days ago, i was moved here. To the psychiatric wing. Where everyone talks softly to you, as though you're a child. Where all the meals are soft, as though you no longer have the ability to chew. Where all the walls and edges are slightly soft, as though you could kill yourself on the corner of the sink, or those plastic meal trays they pass out. 

I loathe the people within these walls. They act like they're invalids, when i know they're not. They know they're not, but they have lost hope. The nurses humour them, making them worse by layering thick doses of pills into palms of their hands. Each colour bright and vibrant, the only bright thing they will ever see again.

Right now, i can see a tree through the window in my room. In the first days, i limited myself to looking outside only once a day, for however long five minutes felt that day, because time in here doesn't exist. I wanted to savour what i could see, so i didn't run out. Today i am on to the tree trunk. The brown bark is curled in some places, winthering. It looks thin, curling up edges like ribbons on christmas, only the most disappointing colour left behind. Ridges run deep along the trunk, its peppered with small cuts and long ones too. It reminds me comfortingly that scars are in nature, and we are nature too. Nature breaks, like we sometimes do. Nature evolves to new circumstances, like we do. It's just how we handle these things is what counts. I tell myself to stop looking at the tree, taking my gaze away from the trunk. I see that it's windy, the clouds are an angry dark grey against swirls of white. I bring my focus back inside, onto the wall infront of me. Beige.

It's hard in here, to see the light, so to speak. I keep thinking about that book. The one Becca and I read in the school library, the one which we had to bribe the librarian with my mother's homemade kimchi for because it was above our age rating. One flew over the cuckoo's nest. I keep imagining when the patients in here are going to get together and break out to go fishing, or something like that. I don't really remember the plot, but i remember Becca and i grinning over the open book. 

She used to laugh and say to me that she wished we were there, because she knew we could have fun anywhere. I told here repeatedly that it was not a place for fun. It was serious, and scary. She asked me how i knew. I shrugged. I still don't know how i knew places like these were scary when i was a child. But now i'm in here, i really don't see what's so scary about it. 

I think that the paint on the walls, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, the sturn nurses, that's what makes this place scary. The people within them on the other hand, we're just people who are fixable. Because sometimes we all need to be fixed. Other people just need less fixing than some, less frequently too. Some go their whole lives without needing to be fixed, checked. But others, who have been fixed before, need more in depth fixing, because the body adapts to the ways the old fix helped. 

I keep telling myself that all i need to do is wait for that thing to fix me this time. Maybe a specific drug. Maybe a way of viewing myself, of healing my traumas. Or maybe a fishing trip with all the inpatients might do the trick. I really couldn't say.