The Bunny Followed Me Home From School Today.

17

I stared at the walls what seemed like months, uninterrupted silence that screamed in confinement. I walked across the room, diagonally, and then again from the neighboring corner creating an imaginary x within the room expressing my errors. There are so many, on one hand, I couldn't count.

I often imagined this room as though I was back home - in some ways it feels like Homewood - the privacy, the youthful demise, and the colorful imaginations that cling to reality.

I was attacked in my dreams for many nights after being declined my plea for release, I was running out of Homewood - over that bridge, that had crashing water against the borders, the splashes, trickling along the road, happy for their escape - a way out even it was little by little though, they was still getting the hell away. The bunny kept pulling me back, so I could never make it to the other side of the bridge, physically, I was held back by an invisible force, mentally, I didn't want to go.

There's perfection within these gates.

The Easter bunny, plastered against everything, in April, the fluffy bunny whose lap you sit on in the mall for pictures when pastels were in - this bunny, has locked me to the bridge, I sat and it sat beside me with it's paw touching my shoulder - the shivers accumulating in my blood as we watched the daunting silence of nights in Homewood. Home. Homewood is home.

It's breathe was steady, almost in sync with mine but slightly off, I struggled to blink - no one or thing moved.

Waking from dreams this intense, so realistic are not easy. You can easily fall captive to this world, where no one speaks, but the void of silence is filled with the piling words in your mind, those wanting to be screamed or you can wake up into hell on earth. The world of primitive exceptions, where overgrown children let all the there problems bleed inside of themselves - the pain destroying them, from the inside out.

But sometimes these dreams are good, even with the heaviness, because eventually everything turns dark - and sometimes darkness is everything you need to see.

*****************************************

Once I was escorted out for dinner, something unexpected happened, the ringer of the phone shoot through the corridors resulting in the stiffening of the patients faces especially when the sound burst through the open cracks - under the doors and squeezing through the glass, leaving one overwhelming sensation - that someone was getting a call and it might not be for them. Mom.

"Hello," after picking up the phone I immediately wanted to throw it back down, though it was only right to miss my mom I felt betrayed beyond measures - she hadn't come to visit me, face-to-face, at least, she'd often come in dreams as if I never existed to her beyond that.

"Mrs. Jones?", I looked and the nurse was behind me, not the big man I'd normally see, but someone a little smaller - a petite woman with shiny blonde hair, dark red lipstick and fake reading glasses - the ones with clean shoes. She stood gap legged behind me, her arm outreached.

"Sweetheart, I miss you!" She cheered, "in these gates it isn't the same without you. How are the people? I heard you made a friend named Roy?"

Roy. I chuckled, where'd you hear that - she has been here.

"Mrs. Jones, I'm going to need you to put the phone down and follow me back to your room," she pulled my shoulder back, abruptly, and everything stopped.

"What are they yelling for?" My mom yelled through the phone.

Before I knew it the big nurses had returned, appearing from the invisible doorway where a few seconds ago, no one stood, and I was being dragged to my room in the west wing, two doors down from Emerson's - around the corner from the showers, 34B. 36B. And Shower Cells1.