& I don’t know whether or not I want to forget. As the light flickers over me, switching on and off at seemingly random intervals, I somehow draw a link to Michelle, switching my light off sometime during the night all those months ago, almost a year now. & I wake, screaming for fear of the dark. Ican’tdothis.Ican’tdothis. Its laughable, the conclusions that the mind draws, like someone mending a tear, sewing the two pieces back together again – the only difference is, my links, unlike the careful stitching are so illogically irrelevant. & yet the memory remains, clear as a bell in my mind & I can hear her whispering in the dark as my screams turn to sobs, “its okay Rach, it’s okay” from my doorway, before switching the light back on for me and inching the door back to almost-shut. & as I pull my knees to my chest & wrap the bright hospital doona tight, keeping my stuffed animals close, I know that she’s still outside my door, keys to the treatment room in hand, waiting to see whether she needs to medicate me back to into sleep again.
I feel that sometimes I define myself by the six weeks I was deemed “crazy” & the one that preceded it when I “went crazy.” By the scars that I still have, for each & every single one of those days, that I can trace a memory to each one - and more. By the places where the IVs entered my arms & the where eyes burnt holes through my back I find tangles of comfort, fear, regret and definition. I try to tell myself “this isn’t me” because I know I am more than a red folder in the nurse’s station with my name stamped down the spine in letters larger than life. But then the question I still have no answer to brews, again. Who am I? If this isn’t me, who am I?
Those past few weeks saw me learn to sleep in a bed where I began to feel safe. “My” bedroom was almost a comfort to me then & being uprooted was frightening. From my bedroom I could see a bright, round, yellow light that reflected a massive window in the flats far opposite through the bullet proof glass that Candice couldn’t break with a chair. My window sill was lined with offerings & Andrea always laughed when she wheeled her bike past my window of an evening, coming back the next morning to tell me that my sill proved I’d been there far to long. The thoughtful cards carefully printed with “get well soon,” small gift bears bearing messages of “I love you” & photo frames with glass panes that somehow escaped anyone’s attention, each time they picked them up to tell me how beautiful we all were inside the boundaries of the decorated metal frame, were – she was right – reminders of the time passing & the world that kept spinning without me. I always kept an orange, a tennis ball and my home made stress balls that Kate made me once, in the middle of the night, once closest to my head, on the edge of the sill, so they were always there, just in case. On my desk were flowers that seemed to be eternally dying. They lasted so long, but every morning I’d scrape away the dead petals that fell to the floor & walked across the hall to dispose of them– as if I threw away a piece of myself each morning, tearing back the layers until finally I found that there was nothing there, & the world kept on spinning. Top draw for underwear, in no particular order & I folded my clothes in the wardrobe. Dirty clothes I threw under my desk until the pile was big enough for me to timidly knock at the nurse’s station & quietly ask if someone could take me to do my washing. Along my desk I carefully lined my folders of schoolwork that taunted me every time I tried to sit at my desk. Mary eventually sent them all home. On one side of the desk I kept an ever-growing pile of pieces of paper that I once hoped held the answers. Endless sheets of paper: mood diaries, coping strategies, anger management, inspirational quotes, pieces of art & endless word competitions that I long ago gave up on & sent as a gift to recycling. Over the mirror I’d yellow-tacked the paintings that were offered as gifts from others & students that I still have today, hidden in a bag in my real bedroom, which were interchanged with photos from the outside world, another sharp reminder of the turning world I was locked away from. I’d throw two towels from the linen cupboard over the back of my chair when my own towel spent hours in the dryer, and even though they weren’t the homely, comforting pink of my own, but the standard hospital white with blue “Macarthur Health Service” in large, glaring letters printed down them, they were safe & clean. The top shelf of my wardrobe housed treasured and banned possessions – the box Tika made for me the day she left, the headband I accidentally snapped in half and discovered other uses for & our Monopoly, until it got rehoused in the nurses station when an especially prudent nurse deemed it “unsafe”. My growing collection of stuffed toys sat, lined up against my pillow, watching the crack in the doorway for me. They used to laugh, especially at my ducks. Amber & Mary said they looked more like platypuses, and I was always offended but they tucked me in with them none the less. The safest place of all was always behind the door & I can’t count the number of times a nurse opened the door wide enough to bump me, without realising I was there before wishing they’d used their power to open it outwards. There is nowhere to hide in a place like that, and I was only doing my best. The day Nicole went, I sat behind the door & cried until Kate came and sat with me. Then again the day Tika went, and then when I needed to make the noise that was indisputably disallowed, to feel the pain they were trying to prevent me from inflicting - I’d hide there & hit as hard as I could because I knew it would take them longer to find me & I just needed it. This room was my comfort but maybe I’m being sentimental. It was just a bedroom where the staples in the mattress get counted and the air-con vents get checked until they break – it wasn’t my room & it wasn’t really safe. The world was spinning without me, and somehow I let myself get left behind, staring out from behind a bullet proof window.
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