Childish Tendencies

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#This might be a little confusing at first, but I promise you, you'll get it soon.#

Before I was chained to this wretched hospital bed, I used to go to the garden at the end of the street and lie there for eternity. I would feel the grass scratch the back of my neck, but I still wouldn't get up. The clouds around me would disappear into stars, and I still wouldn't get up. I could hear the crickets' chirp in the bushels near my head, but I still wouldn't get up. I don't know why this garden, and the time spent inside it are so important to me. Maybe it was how the grass felt around me, maybe it was the way the birds screamed when I awoke there the next morning, or maybe, it was my incessant need to evade normalcy.

Gardens are designed to be filled with beauty. Flowers, apple trees, fresh grass, singing birds and people - most importantly people. I still laugh when I remember the phony gardens my mother would drag me to when I was little, forcing me to be normal.

Normal; how I despised that word. Normal was for those girls who wore pretty pink dresses and had perfect little families and Barbie dolls. Normal was for those families that would go for picnics on weekends. Normal was that shell of a word used ever too often. Normal was something everybody strived to be - everybody but me. I was everything but normal, and that's why I was here in the first place.

On the morning of September 5th when I first found the garden. I hurried to grab my stuff in flurry that morning over the loud bickering of my parents, about to leave for school as Jake walked into the house, falling sideways under intoxication. When I was younger, I always knew Jake would be there for me. He would pick me up at the end of Elementary School, and greet me with a huge smile. I would then park myself onto his broad shoulders as he got on his bike. We would bike home, he would drop me to the floor, instruct me to remove my shoes and go to the kitchen to put together a meal for us. I'd barge into the kitchen, my socks padding against the wooden floor and perch myself on top of the counter, watching him make cereal. He'd pour the cereal into my favorite green bowl, splashing milk all around. I watched as he would gingerly take a spoonful of the cereal and pop it into his mouth. I'd laugh at how dainty he was and in the next moment I'd be stuffing my mouth with cereal, bringing the bowl up to my lips, chugging it, drowning it into my throat. He would give me a disgusted look and then we'd burst into a milky cloud of laughter as he'd pick me up to wash me off.

All this stopped when mother came back. I would intently wait at my classroom door every day, wide eyed with hope at every tall blonde boy with blue eyes, but he never came. I went home by bus, hurting my bottom with every bump it took. Eventually, I made my own cereal and washed myself. I hoped for him to notice, but he was never there. I only heard him in his room, music pounding, not letting me sleep. That was when I first grew up.

I arrived at school on the fifth of September only to be surrounded by normalcy. Normalcy: so phony that I couldn't help but run away at the prickling touch of it. The girls with their irrational needs to have a group of friends, that sashay down the hallway, hand-in-hand, too afraid to put on even an ounce of weight. The boys standing in bunches, sweaty from sports and too competitive for their own good. And the teachers, oh the teachers, all the fake smiles and the rushed grades and the little teacher world with the teacher mean girls and the teacher jocks. All so normal. And yet, all so happy.

Normalcy was never an option for me; that's why I left school that day. The normalcy of the people surrounding me bombarded into my fantasy, making it hard to breathe. So I ran- I ran out the open gates of school and onto the street, I ran on the sidewalk, letting my feet guide me, I ran past the traffic lights and the slow cars, I ran past clothing stores and shoe stores and flower shops, I ran and ran. I ran until I reached the trashcans.

I find it both pleasurable, and ironical that I found the place where I was going to avoid reality behind garbage. The abnormality of it pumps me up even now, making me want to dance and sing and scream, here in hospital hospital bed.

The first element of beauty I saw behind the trashcans was the tiny rustle of leaves and the screeching of a black bird. Later, I heard tired insects buzz about inside and my need for the extraordinary took over.

I walked into the garden to the smell of rotting wood, which I later found came from an old swing hanging off a tree in the middle of the garden. I saw half eaten apples on the drooping trees, full of insect bites. The bushes on either side were filled with roses that merged into thorns. The prickly yellow grass stood tall, proud of its ugly majesty. Screams of the birds came from inside the trees as the swing on which I sat rustled. I was in love with this place already, and best of all, there were no people. The garden embraced me in abnormality and disorder, making me return to it everyday and forget about those normal folk outside.

I was a caterpillar and the garden my cocoon. I lay there on the swing or on the grass, till day became night, and night became day. I dreamed of things I'd never dreamed before. I was far away from normality and now I could be me. I dreamed of pigs, white pigs, the ugliest pigs ever seen. I dreamed of fairytales, starting with happily ever afters and ending in once upon a times. I dreamt of black horses with princesses swooping down to save me. I dreamt of the sun eating the moon up at night and puking it out in the morning, just like the girls did in school. I dreamt till I exhausted myself from dreaming and finally fell asleep.

They say that the human mind is easily distracted. They say that I could be doing something and the next second doing the opposite. It's all about distractions. So, I used these to my advantage. Humans think that distractions are bad, I, however, know they're fascinating. Distractions cause you to divert your attention to something else, something other than the thing that's happening in that very moment. You're stuck in reality but you're still somewhat in a fantasy. Just like in the garden, I was in normality, but I was still somewhat in a daydream. That is of course, until I arrived here.

I flex my sore wrists, feeling the pull of the cuffs. The mattress-less steel bed pushes into me and its metal cools my naked back.

"Let me out!" My throat burns with dehydration. I arch my back, resisting the restraints pulling me back. My eyes are heavy with lack of sleep and my lips are blue against the freezing cold. "Please, please, I'm not crazy." Tears trickle down my cheek, as the shackles around my ankles feel tighter. "Jake, I'm not crazy."

I try to lift my hands to brush black hair away from my face but the cuffs only form larger bruises on my wrists, pushing me back.

"Goddamit, please let me out."