I woke with a start the next morning due to the seemingly blinding light of the hallway when the door was open. One of the nurses had come to wake us up. There was this one second in which I thought I was home, but then I realized I was here and then my mind started to race with anxious and angry and empty thoughts. I had felt too energized that morning. My body needed to move at all times.
There were two new people at breakfast. One was a girl with curly, black hair and olive colored skin. The other was a guy with dark eyes and a buzz cut.
"Hey," I said to the new guy.
"Oh Hey," he responded
"What's your name?"
"Greg. Yours?"
"It's John."
"Hey, is it like as bad as you would think it to be here?"
"Well, it depends on your specific situation. Who is your roommate?"
"Billy."
"Lucky you. Mine is a bit of an inhuman prick, but a genius. Speak of the devil," I spoke as he walked into the room.
"Suicide? Both of you? For God's Sake," he mumbled. Everyone else ignored him.
"Jesus, you've got it bad. How long have you been here?" Greg said.
"A day."
"What else goes on around here?"
"Well, as you can taste, the food is terrible. The showers are sometimes painful. Sometimes, people do crazy shit-"
"Watch the language," said a staff member. I sighed.
"And some of the staff can be pricks," I finished with a softer tone.
Sally ran out of the room suddenly. A nurse saw this and quickly unlocked the bathroom door.
"What's up with her?" Greg asked.
"She's pregnant," Sherlock said automatically.
"What?" I said.
"Yeah. You didn't know?"
"No. It never really came up yesterday when I was around her."
I had gotten some stares after that last comment. I didn't exactly know what to look for in a pregnant woman. I had just thought that she just had a muffin top.
The morning meeting then started after the bulky plastic chairs were arranged correctly around the room. Everyone went around and shared. Some had the same goal, like Sherlock. Others made different ones.
"To start here well," said Greg.
"I want to reorganize my part of the room," Anderson said twitching ever so slightly.
I was last again and I thought of a new goal.
"To be more expressive."
Music was after the Morning Meeting. My group had to put on shoes to go outside the unit. Spending that day without shoes made me miss them and value them. When we found our way to the small music room, we each got a turn on the drums, learning different rhythm. I had loved it. There was extra time at the end, so the leader had asked if anyone knew anything on the piano. One of the girls played The Office theme song.
I had to sit through the first part of a history presentation in school. It only made me nervous for what was minutes away.
My parent meeting finally came. My thoughts seemed like birds in the sky, flying towards the east. They flew so high and fast that I could not catch them.
The door of the room next to the one I was admitted in was opened. My mother looked shaky and my father was stone cold I sat in the chair provided. Ella started the meeting.
"John, please tell your parents as much of what you feel comfortable sharing about your feelings," she prompted.
"Well, I have been feeling depressed for the past ten months or so. I don't know exactly how or why it happened; it just did. I have been feeling suicidal for the last three of those months. I started to develop a plan a week ago because I felt so overwhelmed and obviously it failed."
"Why didn't you tell us John?"
"Because I told myself that I wanted, I wanted to protect you. I was so scared. I didn't know what to do about my thoughts even though they were too much for me to handle. I thought that I would become even more of a burden to the family. My mind blocked me from even getting the words out."
"Can you please share what things in your life influenced your depression?"
"I think that just all the stress in my life did it for me. School stress. Issues with my friends. And most of all, family issues."
"What did we do to hurt you John? We only want the best for you," retorted my father.
"Excuse me for not submitting to your plan for my feelings. I am so sick of you telling me what I should do with my life and who I am." I stand up. "I am my own fucking person so please get the hell out if you don't support that."
"No," my dad said. "and do not use that language around us." My mother started to sob. I was about to lose it.
"John, please sit down. Now please, everyone calm down" Ella said with a neutral expression. "John, please explain why you feel this way.'
"You refused to respect Harry as a lesbian, which is bullshit because she is a good person. O sorry, I forgot you wanted calmer language. BS. Also, you want me to get a job just so that you can whatever you want with the money, which made the family unstable financially. You and mom constantly fight, putting me, and sometimes Harry, in the middle. You manipulate me to always see your point of view, so can you just stop."
"John, can you step out of the room for a second so that I can talk to your parents alone."
"Fine."
Then, I just waited in the hallway so that she could talk to my parents about my feelings. My psychiatrist saw me there and motioned me into the room I was admitted in so that we could talk.
"How is your parent meeting going?"
"Terribly. My parents are not responding to anything that I am saying in a constructive way. It is making me really angry."
"Well, if you want advice, just stay calm. You can't change them, only yourself," she said. "Have you been feeling any side effects or changes?"
"I have been feeling very energized and it is harder for me to think straight."
"Okay, we need to first change the time of day when you take your medication to the morning, which will have to start tomorrow. It is no big deal and nothing you should worry about."
"Um thanks. I had better be getting back," I said as I noticed Ella outside the room.
As I reentered the room that the meeting was happening in, I could see the tears on my mother's face and the softened face of my father. At the sight of them, I started to soften.
"John, I just asked your parents how they were feeling in response to what you said."
"We have realized what we have done wrong. We will do our best to see to it that you are less stressed. We love you so much John and don't want you to forget that," said my mother, who mustered up her strength to say that. I had become somewhat suspicious. What she had said seem too good to be true.
"Thank you."
"Do you all need a couple of minutes to talk privately?"
"No, it's okay." Then, I faced my parents, "I am okay here and can you please not visit me tonight."
"Okay," responded my dad. My parents both hugged me and left.
Then I went to my next group, anger management, which had already been going for twenty minutes.
"We just discussed this composition about anger and now, we are filling out this sheet about anger," said the group leader, handing me both the papers.
I had to pull in a clunky green plastic chair from the day room across the hall. Sherlock looked up at me as I reentered; only this time, he had softer eyes. It seemed as if they wanted not just to observe, but to truly see.
I then looked at my worksheet it asked what people or things make me angry and if and/or what I could do about that anger. Luckily, I was still feeling expressive after that family meeting. After five minutes, everyone had to go around and say what they wrote. Philip was asked to start.
"In general, I have a short temper and build up anger easily. No one specifically makes me angry, disorder and mess do. I think that I can manage my anger better using coping skills and talking things out."
"Good."
"I am angry at my boyfriend for being an idiot and my parents for kicking me out without understanding how I was feeling. I should be patient with them and try to be expressive with them," Sally said after Philip went. More people went after her.
"Sherlock?"
"I am angry at people."
"Coping skill?" the leader said, seeing that asking him why he was angry at people would be useless and offensive.
"Not to be bored."
More people went in between us.
"I am angry because I am not heard. I guess my coping skill would just to, um be expressive," I said, looking down.
"Good John. And Greg?"
"I am just so mad at the world right now."
"What about the world is making you angry right now?"
"It is just so unfair that some lives are more tragic than others. Sure, this is nothing new, but it still sucks. How do I have to deal with two family deaths in the past year when there are people our age that just can be lazy and don't have to deal with this suffering?" Greg said. I was surprised at how calm he was when reading off his paper. He had seemed to hold in and metabolize those feelings for a long time.
"Everyone has to deal with suffering Greg. Some just have to deal with it more than others."
"I know that, but I feel like I can be angry about it. I just have to deal with my anger so that it doesn't hurt me."
We ended early, so we had ten minutes of free time. Sherlock went back to our room, but I stayed in the day room. There was this water/ice machine and a lot of people were having cups of ice chips. I decided to try them and it was strangely satisfying to just bite into them. Then the lunch cart came and I realized that there was cake in the lunch. It was not half bad. I talked to Greg at lunch.
"Parent meeting go badly?" Sherlock said in the middle of reading his book.
"Yeah kind of," I said. "I blew up in front of them in the first part of the meeting and had to leave the room for a 'couple of minutes', but after that, everything seemed fixed."
"That was a bad parent meeting. You will probably not move up to purple for the maximum time."
"Yeah," I sighed. That did not seem very fair since my emotions were repressed. "So do you know what this medication group that we have next is?"
"I am presuming that the nurse comes to talk to us about the medication we are on, but I have never been. I've only been here for three days."
"So you're going to move up to purple tomorrow yeah?"
"Yup."
"Hmm. What do you think of Greg?"
"New guy?"
"Yeah."
"He's okay I guess. Boring like the rest of 'em."
"Is there anything that isn't boring to you?"
"Well, I like stuff that involves crime and deductions, but mostly murder."
"Murder?"
"Yeah, I like solving them, especially weird ones." Sherlock beamed. I had never seen him do that before. "When I am out and not high, I sneak around the crime scenes and it's awesome."
"You've never been seen?"
"I don't think so. I am pretty good at hiding," he grinned, looking at me the same way that he did during anger management. My mind stopped working for a second, and then it thought at the speed of light. I couldn't pin down what I was feeling, but it was new to me.
A staff member then appeared to show us to a day room. There, the nurse started to lecture us on all the different groups of psychotropic drugs and how we should work with them so that we could feel better.
"So SSRIs can make you drowsy, dizzy, nauseous-"
"No."
"What is it now Sherlock?"
"Most medications can make you feel dizzy. It should be expected as a side effect anyway."
The nurse rolled her eyes at this and continued.
I moved mindlessly through the tea and snack line and into social worker group. Greg came with us.
During our social worker group, we talked about what we had in mind for the future, which mostly meant what job we thought we might have. At first, we, as we usually did in the ward, went around and just said what we thought based on the topic.
"I want to be a part of the police in one form or another," Greg started.
"Detective."
"Gardener."
"A scientist of some sort."
"Maybe a writer or an artist."
"A pastry chef."
"I don't know." slipped out of my mouth when it was my turn. Ella shot me a concerned look. I knew that I probably should have just lied.
I then fell again into my own bottomless pit of darkness. My future felt distant and untouchable. How could I have dreams and goals when I felt that way? How could anyone else for that matter? I couldn't focus for the rest of the group.
I grabbed my journal after it ended. When I wrote, I saw that I just didn't feel human anymore. Things like hope, purpose, and love had escaped me long ago. There was nothing and no one for me to cling on to keep me alive. I felt like I shouldn't have been alive anymore because I lost those basic human qualities, or so I thought. Everything human had died in me already, so why live anymore? A little bit after I started writing, Greg walked in a long with the new girl, whose name was Janine, to work on the level change paper work. We talked as Greg and she worked and I wrote. It was nice having a normalish people to talk to. My dark feelings had started to fade.
The AM came suddenly. I had, of course, completed my goal and Sherlock had not. Nothing was new.
I watched and sometimes played ping pong after the meeting just because I felt like I had to. Greg was more into it than I and was very occupied by it. I quietly slipped to my room just to listen to Sherlock play. Everything else vanished and I felt at home there.
Dinner came and passed. We walked throughout the ward and eventually out into the cold. One of the staff members had to open the gate and then we went into the building where the gym was. I had overheard others saying that it was the long term teen unit. Most of them didn't pay attention to us, but there was this girl with short blond hair and a guy with large brown eyes who just looked at me in passing. I did not understand why.
The gym was simple and hot. There was hardly anything to do. At first, I just sat on the side. Some of the other patients say me and invited me into their passing circle. I passed a small circle of girls that were talking.
"So have you guys like watched porn before?"
I tried to erase that from my brain, but it was like someone super glued it to my brain. I looked around and finally in Sherlock's direction. He looked like he was praying or being spiritual, but what I saw was an impossibility. He was just thinking. My thoughts took over as I walked and suddenly I stopped and my hands were touching an old ball.
We left twenty minutes later. As we walked outside, I embraced the cold, but then it seemed to have touched and pried at my soul. It let itself in and made its nest there. My head turned to look behind me to see Sherlock stop his stare in my direction. I felt tempted to slow down to talk to him, but something, some thought, stopped me.
"John, you have a call," one of the staff members.
I got up from the game that I was playing. As I walked past the other day room, I took a look at Sherlock's family. His parents did look normal and even touched him much to his agitation. Mycroft sat across from Sherlock. He didn't look like he was inconvenienced and had better things to do, which was probably why he was staring at Greg and his parents across the room. I was a little bit confused, especially if Mycroft hid his emotions like Sherlock.
I finished walking over to the phone and the staff member connected me to the call.
"John?"
"Harry?"
"Are you okay there?"
"Yeah, well at least I am right now," I lied. "Where are you calling me from?"
"I am staying at my girlfriend's house tonight, but it's just been tough lately. Don't worry about it."
"That sucks."
"Yeah it does. So what is it like in the loony bin? Are people there really crazy?"
"No, it isn't as bad as you would expect. No one is trying to hurt anyone else. People here just have some problems. It's not like they don't have a lack of sense. Some are… different, especially my roommate and this guy called Philip."
"What the hell does your roommate do?"
"Well, he is arrogant and calls himself a high functioning sociopath. The two things that don't bore him are drugs and 'deductions', particularly about murder, but don't worry about me. He is actually kind of nice to me."
"Wow John. Crazy just makes more crazy. It is a slippery slope to fall down."
"Oy, shut up. I made another friend too, who is much more normal. He just came today and I don't think he'll be here for awhile. He seems pretty happy."
"Don't be so defensive. It makes you sound guilty. So how did your meeting today go?"
"I blew up and made mom cry, but I did get somewhere with them."
"That's good. Listen, I have to go now so good luck."
"Ditto, talk to you later."
"Bye."
After I put down the phone, my soul felt like it was caving in and vanishing. There was no reason for it, which made it hurt more. I automatically moved myself back into the plastic chair, grabbing my ice chips and munching on them. My whole consciousness hit a wall for two and a half hours. I did not move until I was ushered into the bathroom for a shower, which only made my own mental pain real. No one in the day room really noticed.
Lights out came an eternity later. Not a second after I flopped into my bed, Sherlock had saw that I wasn't feeling well mentally. I knew that he didn't know what to say, so the night was silent. We both didn't sleep for hours. I yearned for a conversation with him or some other sort of stimulation. I needed to fall apart with him, but we were too scared to disturb the still night.