MAX POV

It was a normal day with a crisp blue sky. Well, normal for everyone else. Not for me. I got out of the car and shut it behind me. I didn't know what to say, so I just followed them. I didn't think there was a legitimate reason to be there. Thoughts were not really racing through my head, but as my mom and step-day, Jeb led me down the sidewalk I began to feel a gnawing worry. I thought maybe they would arrest me for my freak out. Yet, it had to be a joke; I knew they could not arrest me for this. I had committed no crime.

I also knew that this would not be what you under normal circumstances even call an episode of crazy. I thought I had completely recovered. I had overcome this debilitating disease. I also had a lot of things going on inside me that I couldn't just shove aside. It was the accumulated snowball of everything I had been through and when all that got tossed aside, the wreckage of my very being became the object of another practical joke.

"This is what crazy looks like!" I smiled and I laughed.

"This is crazy!" "Look! Look! Is this what you wanted to see? Am I crazy now?" I was angry. I took my mother's little piece of china and threwit onto the floor. Then it smashed into a million tiny pieces. I guess I was a little upset. I had decided that I didn't need therapy about a year before my angry "episode". Sometimes I wonder if I was just too beaten down and tired out to combat my own demons. When being patronized and pushed into a corner, you aren't really given a choice what to think. When your parents tell you if you don't smile and behave, that they'll lock you up, it isn't exactly pleasant.

Of course, I had a record: Fifteen and boarding school, a record of transgressions. My psychiatrist had told me that I was lucky to have such a nice family. The psychiatrist said that since I thought I was better and I wanted off the meds it was my choice, so she closed the book and out I went. But that freedom didn't last very long.

I entered the hospital lobby, awaiting treatment, meds, the stretcher where I would be strapped onto, possibly unconsciously, and who knew where I'd end up? Who could know what rights might be taken away from me while in there?

In that place or was it a place at all?

I wasn't suicidal, I wasn't angry, no it was worse...I was starving for something…maybe understanding. But what would it matter? I knew I was ok.

In the lobby, I sat there and waited. The silence felt surreal and uncanny to me. It was too quiet for comfort. People were mesmerized by the television set protruding overhead from the wall.

I sat next to my mom, who wasn't really saying anything…caught up in her own inner world possibly. It was so disturbing, because it was like not one person noticed me.

"You might be in worse places than a hospital if you didn't have parents like us...out on the street...or in jail!"

No, I wasn't safe anywhere.

"Get in," Jeb said then, "I'm taking you to the hospital.

If you don't walk yourself I'm going to have to drag you."

I think he was more upset about the antique cup than anything else. It felt like it anyways, like I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. I used the bathroom in the ER. I felt normal, I felt OK. I walked up to the doors and tried to leave. I pleaded with them, practically begging to go home.

"I'm ok, see? I'm not sick." I said. But no one listened. Maybe they were blind.

Of course, then about five security guards came and stood in front of the exit doors then led me through the rooms in the Emergency Doors to where I wouldn't be seen. In the waiting room, they made me sit on this couch staring up into the vents for six hours that seemed to last an eternity.

Where was I going to end up?

My thoughts kept spinning, spinning and disappearing into these ideas of what I was going to be put through in one of those mental wards. Even though I felt terrified...I began to stare up at the vents, intuitively. It felt as though a secret source had told me to look up into the vents. Would this become some sort of coping mechanism for me?

"You're going to the hospital" He had said. I hid in the pine trees for an hour until I saw his car pulling up. I am fine, I thought…God. I am perfectly fine for the first time and right now, here they are, ready to take me away…

So there I was, sitting in the emergency room next to mom waiting for the nothing. I was staring straight ahead into the nothing. There was a sign on the wall with instructions on the different stages of washing your hands and it seemed ridiculous to me. Would that be irrational? None of it was paranoia. It just all felt incredulous and wrong. The whole thing was making me feel nervously ill. Everyone seemed so blind.
Why am I here? What the hell did I do and why can't I just get out of here?

My fears started to accumulate. Anxieties after anxieties were passing through my mind of what was going to be done to me at the hospital. I had not had a positive experience in the time I had been in the hospital in the past. But now, even my parents were acting as if it was a punishment. Isolation.

So I shifted my focus from the sign on the wall about washing hands to the doors of the Emergency Room. As they opened and closed, I thought about mom when she was in jail for protesting School of the Americas, about those doors. The kind of doors you can't open from the insides.

Those doors are prison doors. They are prison doors for the sick. What kind of doors will they have at this place? People kept rushing in and out in and out of those doors, and no one knew me, no one saw me. No, I was so invisible to all the doctors and security guards and medics and nurses and my parents and my friends at home who didn't really even know me. It was a deafening sort of feeling. It was completely deafening. I was helpless.

At seventeen there was no way they were going to acknowledge my intelligence. At seventeen I was going to be reduced to the level of a thirteen year old. But everyone there was out to get me, everyone there was out to get me because everyone there was walking past and no one even saw. Well, in times like these when you find yourself in a state of utter isolation and desperation...you may think it's over. It will never leave you for a minute, while in due time the memory does come rushing back. The memory will play out before your eyes, you don't need to see but you will see it in dazzling white colors. It's a beautiful movie; it's the movie of your broken mind.

Can't they see that I am not crazy?! I'm not out of control, no violent maniacal behaviors, no screaming, and no goofy conversations with myself or am I seeing green aliens? What the heck is the matter with me? I didn't do anything that was wrong! I'm not a drug addict, I don't do anything wrong at all. I'm practically perfect. I'm just sitting here and I am waiting and waiting for what? I just want to go home, or even just out of this building. But they're not going to let me leave the building. I'm seventeen, for Christ's sakes!

You can't just keep me here. Yeah, I may be crazy but that doesn't mean I'm clinically insane! Why the hell are they putting me through all this? I wanted to get better, like I was, okay so maybe I don't know what that means anymore. But this is a punishment. I am being punished for being sick. And because I'm not acknowledging that I am sick I am being punished...that's all it ever felt like to me.

Now my thoughts are really racing. But I just go back to staring at the poster on the wall. Step 2. Rinse with Warm Water. So, that's how they'll do it. That's how it'll happen to me. I see most of the people in the waiting room are watching Martha Stuart's Cooking Show on the television set. Suddenly my eyes avert to the tv and become transfixed there. I begin imagining what happens in that place.

What's going to happen to me?

It begins to become perfectly clear to me. I know what's going to happen now. I will come back out through these same two revolving doors a completely new person. I will be perfectly organized and utterly brainwashed to love Martha Stuart. I can see it now...I begin to have these little skits in my head. I am being brainwashed before a television screen, the screen is blank, my ears are ringing, I can't comprehend anything but what they tell me.

I am responsive to their treatment. So I watch the television screen and Martha Stuart is there and as the rest of the world just washes away, all that's left. Yes, that's what they will do...they will force me to watch Martha Stuart over and over again. Even though in my head it's still sarcasm, I feel pretty much hopeless. They never knock me out or even bother putting me in the stretcher. Why be non-compliant when you don't have a choice? I had been waiting for six hours just to figure out if I was going to be put in hell or limbo. So I walked into the ambulance, sat down and told the person next to me all about it.

I told her all about the abuse I had been experiencing, the bruise my step-father gave me when I said I felt like he was being sexist. She said she would see what she could do. When we got to the hospital, I looked up at the big brick building and could only feel my stomach churning. Or maybe I didn't feel anything but panic crawling through my veins. This place looked like a prison, for sure. I felt so much of that nothing growing inside of me. They took me in through the entrance into the hospital. This is where they are going to do strange experiments with my head. I don't want to go inside. I can see blue curtains hiding people...people that have been taken hostage like me, but more likely the unluckier ones.

Who knows, maybe I'll make it out alive. They make me get onto a stretcher because it is still their policy; and then they wheel me up the elevator and I just give an odd smirk to everyone. I feel ridiculous and the whole experience feels so patronizing. That was when I thought I was normal.

Then I was admitted and led in through the doors. I started to feel better, although still kind of disassociated from all this stress. Maybe they will try to help me? There are no strange scientists hiding behind these blue curtains or metal bars. But all I want is to be left alone. A sense of calm settles down over me and I feel like I am safe once again. I am to meet with an older woman with blondish hair who fills out paperwork and a questionnaire.

"So, do you have any history of drug usage?"

"No.

The list goes on and on and I guess according to their list of transgression, I'm a Saint. I'm taken down to the "cafeteria" by two orderlies. One of them gets me a juice box while the other watches over my shoulder. I am waiting to see a doctor for a physical. It was so quiet and peaceful in there and at length the orderlies came and took me to my bedroom. I crawled into bed and tried to sleep then they woke me up again.

They gave me a pretend IQ test, that the doctor proudly remarked I had Aced.

A younger man pulled out a stethoscope and measured my heartbeat. Then, finally, I flopped down to let my body relax into the hard bed. As I lay in my tiny bed I stared up at the vents in the ceiling. It would a lonely night. Once again I'm staring into the ceiling, but now I'm completely in the dark, scared, and completely alone with my mind. I begin to think I can hear people outside whispering about me...

"Oh, she is a Schizophrenic."

"Do you know what they do with people like them?"

"Execution..."

"This is so wrong...so terrible."

"Well I tried to argue with them."

"I tried to tell them that she seemed fine to me..."

"She's a schizophrenic."

Yes, and I can still see them digging outside my window. That must be where they bury all the dead bodies. That must be what they do with crazy people like us, with people like me. I just can't wait to wake up from this nightmare.

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May or may not continue, depending on interest levels! :)