jace

August: Sausage Flavored Happiness

wednesday
The most vivid memory I have of Nebraska Psychiatric Hospital is waking up after I'd been there for 48 hours. Tucked into a bed of white sheets, I sat up and stretched as if it was a normal start to a normal day. I was in one of those hospital gowns that showed your butt if you didn't hold it closed (which I found incredibly humiliating despite the fact that I was by my lonesome). When I stood I saw my toenails for the first time in days and that's when I began to notice that things were different. My toenails seemed more like claws, stretching and curling and morphing into something else that made me different, digging grooves into the floor. The white floor. The white walls (that had been patched several times where the room's previous inhabitant had created holes). And the white bed and everything was white, as if I was living in a cloud and I've always been afraid of heights.

And then I was screaming at the top of my lungs without really knowing why. Two faceless, female nurses came in and tried to calm me down saying, "jace, please calm down. Don't you know where you are?" But I didn't know where I was and I only screamed louder because they were talking without mouths. They had to call for a doctor and she stuck me with a needle before I calmed down and my eyes hooded and I went to sleep.

I don't remember waking up, but I do remember sitting up in the bed and hearing:

"Hi jace." The man was young, around my sister's age and held a clipboard on his lap. He wore a suit with a black tie that looked more like a black snake were strangling him.

"Hello," I said, eyes darting from the doctor to the snake to my mom and back.

My mom was silent, which wasn't like her at all, her face was red and puffy and all she could do was look at me. Her hair was pulled back, which meant something was wrong because my mom hated ponytails.

"My name is Dr. Derrick Carmichael and I was hoping I could ask you a few questions. Would that be okay?" I would come to recognize his tone of voice as the one he used when he thought I was going to breakdown or punch a wall or something of the like. I didn't see why I was being interrogated by Dr. Derrick Carmichael at all, I had a psychiatrist and his name was Dr. Rosenthal. He was my friendly neighborhood psychiatrist, the one that I had spent an entire year getting used to, I wasn't ready to deal with someone completely new.

I nodded, I didn't feel like talking, but if I wasn't polite I would get in trouble and I didn't think I could handle getting in trouble. I braced myself for questions like, "Are you eating right?" "On a one to ten scale, how happy are you?" But instead I got, "jace, what's the last thing you remember?"

Without hesitation I said, "Going to sleep last night after I stopped watching Jeopardy because none of it was making any sense."

He pulled a small notepad and pen from his front shirt pocket and began to scribble things. "What's the date?"

"August 2nd."

"What if I told you that it's August 5th?"

I looked to my mom again, she was looking out of the large window to left, like she was thinking hard. The window didn't give much of a view, a few thin trees were all there was to see. I shook my head at Dr. Derrick Carmichael, "That's not right."

Dr. Derrick Carmichael then told me that I'd gone missing on August 3rd and that some policemen found me roaming around Lincoln County. I'd been in "an almost drug like state," which I find weird. I don't understand how anyone can almost do or be anything, either they are or they aren't. I also found it weird that I remembered nothing of this episode.

"You've been here for a full 24 hours," Dr. Derrick Carmichael said, keeping his words niiiicee and sloooooow. "This is the first time you've been this responsive, conversational even. But I wanna keep you here a little longer, just so that I can watch you."