From the journal of Patient Sixteen written under the initials of CTL, CL, JTT, and JNN, dated in 13 Feb 2001; voice recorded by Dr. Quirrero
F I R S T S Y M P T O M:
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warning: this chapter contains a lot of negative triggers. please read with extra caution for the safety of your mental state.
1
SAVING THE people who are rushed to the hospital due to suicide attempts aren't new to Catalina Juliet's field anymore. Seeing people who seemed to be lifeless with dried cuts and blood on their wrists are like as if she is gazing at the constellations that came out from the scarred lines. Or people that are victims of jumping off from a bridge or a building, is just like she is analyzing the sick portrayal of constructing oneself up just to fall down.
What's with the cuts and the free fall aside from helping someone to escape the glass hypothesis of reality?
Is it because even though knowing it co-exist with danger and death, anyone would still find comfort and safety? Comfort and safety, clearly, are two strange words for someone who is severely suffering. Does this validate the desperation of someone to take their own life? Or it just added the ruination that trembles the wall of sanity?
"Huwag kang pumikit, Selene."
Juliet gulps down the imaginary bile in her throat. It took a lot of courage of her to face every trigger, a lot of practice to calm her own mind, and a lot of control to never get tangled up in the weight of the weak humanity. Until her eyes got used to the deep horizontal lines written on the skin and her mind is used to understand every meaning behind it, every definition of every suicide attempts. It is like a mantra, a memorized line that will always run inside of her mind no matter if it is a ripped script. A tragic story she will always read as if she is stuck inside the scene, or in the pages. It is a cliché she will never get tired of. It is simply like a daily routine, or like the breathing exercise of inhalation and exhalation. The sanity of someone else's mind fascinates her that it started to live in every corner of her body, touching every fiber on its way. It is like the gravity, a magnet, pulling her down towards it and attracting her as if it is a salvation. And it will never jumble every ounce of her sanity because it is what normalcy for her.
As she thought so.
"Doc Juliet, ano po ang nangyari?"
Juliet quickly looked over her shoulder as she run with the nurses who are pushing the stretcher in a faster motion as if the remaining pulse of the patient depends on their pace. The woman with a short hair dyed in coffee brown that is running after her was Dra. Benitez, one of the resident doctor.
"Suicide attempt," Juliet briefly answered in adenoidal.
One of the woman who was at the other side of the stretcher is panicking, crying, and begging as she tried to keep the patient's consciousness at bay. And the agonizing soundwaves serve as a flat line, a blur to Juliet's ears, as if her auditory canals shut in their own to avoid something that will stir up her emotion.
