AN: I know this doesn't sound like a Sonic fanfic, but I decided to write something to vent about some stuff that's been going on with me.

Right now the lithium treatment has really worked for me, but for a long time, I felt confused about my condition. That the manic highs felt so good that I never wanted my bipolar to go away. After all, being manic was the reason why I made so much progress on my stories, even though there were at times where I dealt with crippling depression that made me lose my confidence and I would often not write for even as long as a month because I would beat myself up too much.

It was until I thought about suicide and the chaos and the disorganized nature of the mania was beginning to take a toll on my health. I would barely eat and sleep for a week or so. The lows were getting to the point where I would sleep all 24 hours, even what seems to be 48 hours just trying to get through it. It was making a toll on both my writing career and my job, and it had to stop.

I'm proud to say that the lithium hasn't taken away any of my creativity (though ideas will take a little longer to come up with) and I managed to write this just fine, and writing 3,000 words felt like it took nothing out of me at all.

After my long hiatus, I truly feel like I can be more productive with my work now, and I can definitely work on stories such as Fragile Angels again with very little issues. I'm glad I made the right choice in trying lithium and a different anti-depressant, and it's done wonders for me.

I have another oneshot that needs to get done, and then I will work on Fragile Angels again. Thank you for being patient and wonderful.

It's been 48 hours since I've been here. 48 hours translates to two days. It translates to so many minutes I could've spent with my friends. So many minutes I could've spent doing something productive. So many minutes I could've spent bettering my life. But I couldn't better my life, because as the nurses around me told me, I was "ill". My mind was seeping of mercury. It was making me not function like a normal hedgehog. Like a normal person who would've rather spent these 48 hours with someone else. With Shadow.

They kept telling me that my brain was sick. That I needed to stitch it up. Stitch it up like my wrist that still smells of the fresh paint of blood. They wanted to cut one side of my brain smaller so I could function better. Stab my brain with a lobotomy pickax. They told me everything, and I didn't believe in anything they told me.

I was still normal, I told myself. Still able to think clearly. But they said I was lying. But I couldn't even find out the definition of a lie anymore.

I could be anywhere else but here right now, making my eye sockets stare at something else than the pale blue wall that promised me I would get better. But right now I wished my eyes would be ripped out of those sockets, so I could never see the blandness in this life. The darkness that coated everything.

But no, I was in this hospital, with so many wires hooked up to me, latched onto me so they could suck me of all of my fluids, telling me that I had to get my blood levels right and stable again. That the sickness had to go away before I was admitted into a psychiatric facility. A place for a bunch of loons and doctors who wrote you prescriptions without giving a second thought or even a second look in your face, realizing you were real and not a phantom in their daydreams.

My hands were bloodied and in gauze. I don't remember what I did to it.

I don't remember anything, to be honest.

I just knew that I was feeling really good one minute, believing that I was on top of the world, that I was a god among hedgehogs and men, and suddenly, there was this black inescapable hellish pit that I could never dare to escape. It consumed in black hellfire. It continued to tear away at my bones and my flesh and my eyes and I was here, in this hospital, with Satan's henchmen looking over me and checking on me and making sure I wouldn't escape from their little cage that I was in, like an abandoned, shaggy, sheltered dog that pisses in it and they don't bother cleaning it up.

Sick. Illness. They told me that many times. That I was sick with something. But what? I never knew. I simply knew that I dragged my feet when I walked some days, and walked with a stride and a jubilant smile on others. Sometimes the colors of the hospitals, the light baby cornflower blue and the blinding white, it was much more vivid in my vision. And that everything seemed to burst in taste, color, smell, all my senses were much more vibrant and alive, while other days everything was dead and had nothing to prove to me that I was alive too. The hospital food would taste much more blander than what it was. My eyes feel dulled and decayed. Music doesn't sound as good in my ears, in fact it was barely tolerable above a whisper. And my emotions, they were blunt and white. I couldn't show him how much I loved him. I couldn't tell him that I would strive to get better for him, that everything will be okay, because I was normal, a normal hedgehog who could feel love like everyone else.

But even my heart felt like porcelain. It shattered easily too. And I knew that he wouldn't take these news easily, that I was more ill than before, that I had to stay in this shitty hospital for more than 48 hours, more time I could've spent dreaming of him and loving him, but I was in here, with the liquid pouches going inside me, worrying that that they were venom, that I was slowly going to die a painful death.

I could feel it being inserted in my body, with its needle fangs, scaring a hole inside me, ready to lick up all the blood inside me…

I wasn't sure why I was here. I never was given that answer except that I was ill, sick, alone, and I wanted Shadow here more than anything than these demons with their long black licorice fingernails and their teeth shining like cellophane and their eyes as blank as an empty page. They told me I could never leave, and I could never say a word to anyone, because I was deemed insane. The mercury continued to be lapped up by my brain, and the silver sea was beginning to leak into everything.

They told me I wasn't myself, but I didn't even know who I was. I looked at my face in the mirror and it looked…different. My muzzle was bruised, and my green eyes were lifeless and filled with remorse. I could feel the weight of this hospital room beginning to crush my bones, the caring and the concern too much for my body to handle.

I didn't deserve to be cared for.

It was the mercury telling me so, because otherwise I wouldn't believe that. As I sat dazed on the hospital bed, the pale walls beginning to surround me, the flowers given to me by my friends and co-workers were beginning to smell a pungent odor, they were beginning to bleed paint all over the picture of my vision. They were too colorful. They were too bright. I had to get rid of them. I had to make them die.

My hands reached for them, and even with the venom pouch attached to one of my arms, I made it rise and then plunge into the checkered floor.

The vase was soon scattered, in cut glass of crystal that threatened to make anyone's hand and feet scarred and broken. The nurses told me I was irrational. They said I was psychotic. I don't even know what that means right now. Not at this moment.

They gave me a green liquid to drink. It was dark, the color of my pupils, ready to stare into me, telling me that I wasn't right, and it had to be corrected, that my brain needed the right chemicals to function and this drink was the one answer to a calm, peaceful sleep, the most I would ever get in God knows how many months. They shoved the liquid inside me with their many eye-colored fingernails and within minutes, I fell back into that Hell again. The quiet Hell that was reserved for much more sinister followers of Satan, such as Hitler, such as Stalin, where everything was nothing but a chasm that wanted to drain me of this world and into the demon's little fantasies about me being sick and ill that I had to stay here for 48 hours.

48 hours I honestly could've spent with Shadow, and I was here, nothing but a plastic shrunken body that was ready to wilt under the burning hospital lights. The fever was running at 103 degrees, and they gave me something while I wasn't looking. They said Tylenol, but I knew it would kill me even further.

I was slowly dying here. Other than the nameless friends who looked like black silhouettes, black spray painted phantoms, I had no one to comfort me, because Shadow was busy doing missions. He said he had no time for me here. He said he wasn't going to stand for any more of my "dramatic acts", even if I didn't know what those acts were or why they were so dramatic in the first place.

I slept. The Thorazine took me to a different world, where people slept dreamlessly and the nurses' faces were made of chocolate. It was about time for Easter to get here. I could possibly eat them like rabbits with ears that stretched across the horizon of heaven. Maybe God and Jesus were both rabbits. That explains why Easter was dominated by egg-laying, chocolate-skinned rabbits whose insides were either peanut butter or nougat. The irrationality again. It continued to take over my brainflesh.

—

Morning came, and I was still dull, still a bulb that couldn't bloom under these blinding lights. The nurses put my flowers in another vase and put them far away from me, but they were beginning to rot away, and I could imagine maggots eating at their stems and petals.

"You have a visitor today, Mr. Sonic."

Was that really my name? My identity seemed to melt as my mind began to drown under the rage of the silver sea, and I tried to reach for the surface, but slowly, I was sinking deeper to the bottom, back to that quiet Hell.

Was I as bad as Hitler? As sick as Dahmer? As much of a liar as these politicians on my TV today, promising the youth a bright future when they made them into their own little toy soldiers to play with?

I wondered. My hands still were singed upon the fires of the razor blade I played with. I don't know why I thought of suicide. I thought everything was fine. Everything was fine. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't willing to kill myself for myself, to make this sadness go away.

It ate away at everything. My heart was chewed up and torn from all the depression inside me. It ate it like an apple, and it continued to be the worm that burrowed a hole through all my organs, eating them from the inside out.

The only way I could kill it was to kill myself.

Before I could think about it anymore, my visitor was Shadow, his face full of scorn and annoyance at my illness.

It was all my fault, wasn't it, that I was this way?

I looked at my hands, dried with a fresh coat of blood, the stitches closing up the door to my wrists' veins and arteries that kept me alive, and as he stared at me, his face relaxed and he said that maybe, it wasn't my fault, but I really was sick with something. A disorder. He looked it up. It was called bipolar.

"Apparently lithium can help with it. And it can save your life. And…even though you may not think it, I believe that your health is much more important than a passing mood that makes you extremely happy. There's a lot of things in life that can make you feel that way than the shit in your brain."

Like?

"Me, Sonic. Of course you know that's important. And I don't want to talk to you, anymore, until you go through this psychiatric shit and actually get help for it. I'm not going to watch and see you die anymore. I would rather not acknowledge you than to see someone I…really care about die. Either you accept this help or I'm…not going to bother returning your calls, or even live with you. I will leave, as everything that was rational and sane about your life left you."

I was still rational. Still sane. I wasn't crazy.

"You aren't crazy, but you also are not rational. You just picked up that vase of flowers and just threw it on the ground because you said their smell was becoming overwhelming. Is there anything rational about that? You could've just asked the nurses to put it somewhere else. For Christ's sake, Sonic…"

No, that wasn't rational, but have everything so vivid and the odors taking over your line of thought that you decide to do something stupid like that. They're even saying I might be schizophrenic. Do you want to stick around with someone who hears voices in his head, who believes in these delusions and shit? Why are you still with me? Why are you continuing to subject yourself into this torture?

"I don't know. Even I don't know that. But I feel like you're worth it once you admit there's a problem with you."

And go into a mental hospital? And why? I could be doing way better things with my time, you know that. Everyone knows that.

"And what you constitute as a way better use for your time was killing yourself? Sonic, I…wished you would…you would…"

I would what?

"Just accept your damn treatment!" he shouted, his face as red as his quill marks. "You know why you're here. You know why you have to go into the mental hospital. Just accept you have issues. Stop being so fucking clueless about everything! You will get better, otherwise I'm having nothing to do with you. We'll be through, and you will be alone for the rest of your fucking life! Do you want that Sonic? Do you want absolutely no one helping you with this disease? Absolutely no one who will give you the time of day to listen to your fucking problems? Because I won't. It's the same shit all the time, Sonic. That you're sad, that you feel alone, that you can't let this sadness drain out of you. But suicide wasn't the answer. It never was the answer. And you're going to have to put that in your head too, because if you actually wanted to spend more time with me, then you should spend as less time in the hospital you can just accepting you have these…issues. You're lucky you're living in an age where these disorders are actually treatable and understood, otherwise I would've left you a long time ago."

And that was the reason I was spending 50 hours in here. Because I absolutely couldn't stand the fate of him leaving.

I shifted from the extremes of happiness and the extremes of sorrow. One minute I felt like I was born to do something special for the world, that I'm able to think of these beautiful ideas that could change everything, that I truly was a hedgehog after all that had everything in his life put together and I was happy with everything and I couldn't wish for another mood in the world, and then I sink further into the depths of my mercury, that I suddenly wanted to die. That I suddenly hate every fiber of my being. That guns and knives and hooks and pills suddenly look much more enticing, and I indulge in them once in a while, because I could.

My fingers looked like fat worms. I tried to put them around Shadow's hand, but he wouldn't let me.

He said he will see me in the psychiatric facility, that he couldn't stand talking to me for another minute.

Shadow.

"No. I can't do it."

And why not?

"Because…" he paused. "Just…you're sick. I know the nurses have been telling you that all day, but you are. You need to recover from this. And I can't face the pain of you doing this shit all the time. You…acting like nothing in your life could ever go wrong, that you drink and drink and drink until the pain inside you burns away, and you suddenly having these damn fancies of suicide. Why would you go through that? Why would you do that to yourself? You used to been so full of promise, Sonic. I respected you. But now…you're lying on this hospital bed, your thoughts never connecting together, you looking like a doll with button eyes with a fixed smile on your face even though your threads are torn and white blood is puffing through. You can never spend time with me anymore. You could've spent those 48 hours with me. You could've spent time with me when you were thinking of killing yourself. But you're selfish. Always it's about you. You never tell me anything. Everything is a damn secret with you."

I had to keep secrets. That's why I didn't tell him I was in here until the rumor flew that I attempted suicide.

I just told them I cut myself on a machine and fell down the stairs. Falling down the stairs was always the tell-all excuse for self-abuse.

"No it isn't, Sonic. Everyone knows what's going on. You can't hide those stitches on your wrists and tell me you fell down the stairs. It's asinine for you to think you can keep a secret of this mental illness with everyone."

I wasn't bipolar. This was just a rough time in my life, that was all.

I never attempted suicide except for this one lone incident.

"That's a lie."

I never drank until everything seemed to all go to Hell.

"That's a lie too, Sonic."

I never felt this lonely until you came along.

"Are you trying to pin the blame on me?"

No.

"Either way it isn't going to work."

The demons came in again, with their curled teeth and their cindered nails. They told me visiting hours were over. And Shadow punched the baby blue walls until there was a bruise on it. And I simply sighed and gazed at my wrists again.

They looked like little galaxies to me.

—

It was time to leave. I spent 56 hours in this hospital. Hours I could've spent on my life. But it was time to get checked in at a mental hospital. They said I had to spend at least 72 hours in there. So there's more hours I would never get back.

The sun was still black to me. The nurses seemed to be blinded by it but I wasn't. It never shined bright enough for me. I often had to wonder if I should get up in the morning because the blanket I was diving into was so much darker, and I liked the darkness. All my bones were turned to dust and my eyes were often wet with tears, because nothing looked like the yellow golden sun would ever rise up to me again. That I would forever be inside this darkness, that the mercury sea would continue to feed me with insanity, that I would continue to drown and never see the surface again. Never see the pink amber skies, never see the stars that would shine so bright for me.

Forever I drowned in this mental illness, that the only way out was making my wrists bleed all my life. I was sick of pills and therapy. I often imagined them as candy that doctors gave out too willingly. I often thought of what the nurses were talking about prescribing me, that the lithium was a white sand that would somehow make everything go away, at the sacrifice of me being crazy enough to put a damn metal in my body.

"Everything will get better from here on out, Sonic. We promise you. Soon you will look at this moment and wonder why you even thought of suicide at all."

My bathtub was red. I could never forget that moment. I could see it was a bloody sea, that I was ready to die, that I was ready to accept my fate as a martyr, a sacrifice to the gods.

I lifted my bags and hospital supplies. I looked at the flowers as they sat on the nurses' desk, their colors bleeding into the picture again. They looked alive at that moment, as the sun reached for it and picked it up with its golden hands. They proudly looked at me, with their yellow tongues flickering out of their petals, that this was a kiss from God, that truly, everything was going to be okay. That with every black chasm, there was a cliff that held towns and wonders and beautiful people and beautiful things, and if I let my wrist continue to bleed and never dialed 911, I would miss out on life's fragile beauties, that looked so difficult to see once your vision was muddled, once the chasm looked so big and so inviting.

I looked at the hole in the wall.

And I knew that getting better was going to be worth it. Just for one hedgehog who cared too much.

I could spend more 48 hours with him, spend another 56 hours with him, maybe even another 72 hours, once the mercury was drained away and was no longer such a frightening ocean, threatening to swallow me with its unstable shores.

I was ready to get better.

For him.

For us.