Not Too Well

Entry 4: Part 2

Outside the swimming lessons, my visions have only gotten worse. The doctor says it's normal for it to get bad before it gets better, but that's easy for him to say. He's not the one who suddenly sees their coworkers at the end of the hall, screaming inexplicably. Every time I get one of these hallucinations, I'm advised to go straight to his office, where he reminds me again and again that the disease will not leave your body without a fight.

It's a continuous, torturous cycle––wake up, go to my check-ups, fight though my lessons. Having a few hours by myself just to sleep is the only thing I ever look forward to anymore, which is exactly how I felt before I arrived. The main reason I even came to this wellness center in the first place was to unwind, but lately all I feel like they're doing is winding me up more and more.

All I can say is that over this extra week, I've grown equally more dependent on the wellness center as I've grown incredibly afraid of it. I mean, we're talking about a place that wants to and succeeds at curing everybody, regardless of whether or not there's anything wrong with them. That's the thing people are raving about when they write letters to home––the cure they've been given that they didn't know they ever needed.

What kind of things do they have to be doing to make this happen?

All my questioning was more so metaphorical until I ran into that boy yesterday––the one who was escorted out of my meditation session for having his eyes open. It had been almost an entire week since that night, and just seeing him again felt almost like seeing a ghost. I had to blink a few times to make sure it wasn't just another vision of mine.

I found him seated near the door of the cafeteria, fiddling with the glass of water in his hands. He didn't seem to notice when I came over and sat down next to him.

"Hey," I said gently, taking caution. The last thing I wanted to do was make him jump and break his glass.

But he didn't jump. He shouted.

"HELLO!!!!"

The boy's sudden elation made me jump. He gave me a bright smile, big enough that nearly all his teeth were visible. For a moment, I was dumbfounded. Walking up to him, I didn't expect this level of happiness at all. I was actually sort of hoping to find him just as reserved and worried about everything as I was.

"Um, did you have any lunch today?" I asked, fighting to make small talk.

He nodded, tracing the top of the cup with his fingers. "Soup. Toast. And water. They're having me drink so much water now. Need to stay hydrated."

I forced a smile, unsure of how to segue into that meditation from here. Deciding to skip the pleasantries all together, I asked him outright: What happened that night? What did they do when they escorted you out?

Here's where things got strange. He didn't seem to know what I was talking about, no matter how many details I gave.

"It was about a week ago?" I offered.

"I wasn't going to night meditations then."

"You were wearing green glasses."

He tapped the pair on his face. "Mine are blue."

"The instructor was talking about air."

"I've only heard meditations about earth."

"They––they grabbed you," I said, my neck straining. "You said something, and I heard a slap. You were gone when I opened my eyes."

The boy shook his head, eyes oddly blank. "You must've had a bad dream."

"No. It was a real session. You were there. I was there. I could feel the chair beneath me and everything."

"But that's not possible. Nobody in the wellness center would slap someone. They're here to cure us, not hurt us."

A chill ran down my spine at those words. Paired with the smile that was still reeking off his face, it all seemed too staged. Too practiced. Just the way he spoke––like a devout preacher reciting a hymn for me––felt strange and compulsory. I searched his eyes for some kind of emotion, but they were still so blank.

Almost . . . fogged up.

"What did they do to you?" I asked

"Pardon?"

"When they took you," I said. "They did something to you."

"They never took me anywhere."

"They made you forget it."

The boy narrowed his eyes. "You're not accepting the cure like you should be. If you were, you wouldn't be having these elaborate delusions."

I tried to tell him they weren't delusions, but he wouldn't listen to me. He got up from his chair, signaling to one of the nurses to take over. I was brought back to the doctor against my will, where he once again upped my prescriptions. It started today: Eight drops of medication now, instead of one or two. I still don't know what that drug is doing for me. I don't know what any of this is doing.

There is something to be said about the front lobby of the wellness. It is a mixture of comfort and luxury––the soft velvet sofas, the cool marble floors, the warm light shining over everything. Walking in, you feel as if you've walked into a five star hotel and your grandmother's house at the same time, as if the two could be perfectly combined.

I'm sitting at one of those sofas in the lobby right now, watching new guests enter and take it all in. Sometimes their eyes widen at the grandeur. Sometimes they exhale with relief. But no matter how they react, they all enter through the same large front doors, a trickle of employees following them in with bags in their hands. And that's all they do: Enter.

I have spent three days sitting around the lobby, and I have never seem a person leave before. The cars in the window come up the driveway, let people out, and pull away without picking up a single passenger. I'm not sure where people go when their time is up here––when they've finally cured themselves enough to take on the real world. Is it even possible to do that? No matter how hard I try, I only seem to be getting worse.

"You cannot keep fighting the diagnosis," the doctor told me yesterday. "You've been cut off from your work life for two weeks now, and yet you are still letting it rule you. Things are never going to get better if you give your illness room to grow."

I know those words were supposed to make me feel better, but they only made me more frightened. How am I ever supposed to return to my normal life if it's somehow the source of my illness? How am I ever going to walk out of those front doors knowing I'm not going to start seeing things again?

And what is better, exactly? Is it clueless and deliriously happy like the boy in the cafeteria? Is it a life cut off from those outside "diseases" entirely?

Is it staying here at the wellness center forever?