Happy Saturday! Hope all of your weekends are going well!
Patient Mary leads me down the hall, pointing out other patients as we go. I try to listen to her, but sometimes she talks too fast that it's hard to follow along and then it's easier to pretend that I'm listening than to actually comprehend her words. Emmett would shake his head. He is always berating me for how lost I get in my own thoughts. If he were here, he would probably say something like, "Listen to her, Bella. Get to know this place. You need to survive."
But surviving is so hard sometimes. Just doing what I'm asked to do? Doesn't that sound easier?
Even so, some names do stick in all the words. Maybe it's because they're the different ones. Insane? Probably. But we all were a little crazy. I couldn't have known for sure, but they all seemed to be on my level. That we all were put in here for someone else's justification.
Like Patient Angela, tall and stocky with wide hips and gaunt features. She's insane for carrying on an affair with a married man. It lasted a whole year before his wife found them in their marriage bed, naked as they day they were born with their legs and arms tangled around one another just on the brink of completion. That was the last almost-orgasm Patient Angela ever had before the wife spent an enormous amount of her husband's money to lock his mistress away in this asylum.
"They say she was pregnant when she came in. A boy."
"What happened to him?"
"No one knows." They wouldn't have tossed the child. Not a male anyway.
"That's Tanya," Patient Mary says, pointing out a statuesque blonde. "She doesn't like men."
"Who does?" I think I'm funny but slightly too numb to even laugh at my own jokes.
"No…" Patient Mary pauses, her smile shy and sneaky all at the same time. "As in sexually."
"Oh…"
"She's no use to society out there so no one cared when she was put in here."
"Oh…" I say again because it's so hard to articulate my thoughts.
"There's Jessica and Lauren." She points down the hall. "They're sisters."
A witty comment catches on my tongue because there's no way I wouldn't have been able to tell that they were related…twins in fact. One body with two beautiful heads sitting on their wide shoulders. Patient Lauren—I think—has the shorter style. cut just below her chin, reminding me of a sort of twenties girl. A fashion that had come back around just a few years ago. Patient Jessica—I think—has longer, wavier hair that's only missing the touch of baby breaths. She's softer looking. Not as severe as her sister.
"No one knew what to do with them outside of here." Patient Mary continues. "No one still knows what to do with them. The orderlies usually leave them alone."
Somehow I knew they were the lucky ones of us all in this place.
