“Grace!”
The grinding of metal on metal pierces the room. The roar pounds on my mind.
“Nothing is going to make it better,” I shriek into the oncoming train. “NOTHING!”
I am screaming so hard, Dad’s face begins to fade. I can’t stop. I can’t stop. Dad begins to grow lighter, blending into the background of the room as the train draws closer and all I can do is clamp my hands over my ears before falling to the ground. I try to pound the noise out of my head.
My teeth sink into the soft flesh of my tongue. Blood pools in my mouth. I gag. Choke for air. My hands tremble against my lips. Scarlet drops fall to the floor.
“Dad!” I cry in fear. “Help me!”
How can there be a train? There is no train. This is not real. This is not real. I bury my hands into the rug. Grip every single fiber. But I hear it. Hear it coming for me. Feel the rumble beneath my feet. I will myself to die before the train explodes into the house. I smash my face against the floor. My nose fills with blood. The iron salt warmth pours down the back of my throat and chokes me. I curl into myself, pulling my knees up to my chest.
“Let me die,” I whisper. Please. Let me die. I refuse to live like this. In this place.
I stop breathing.
Summer
You will command yourself to stop breathing as you study every line in the ceiling. Every scuff on the linoleum floor. In this place of barred windows and white ghostly figures rushing back and forth down halls, disappearing behind doors while other ghosts sit and scream at nothing and everything. The high-pitched shrill scream of a rusty wheel turning over and over in futility as the wheelchair moves past you making your skin crawl with pain.
Stop breathing. Stop it. But your body will betray you. Your lungs will fill with air. Your heart will continue to beat. You will feel the blood moving inside you, living. Living a life that will not be yours. In a body you will not want.
What other choice will you have after they assign you to a room? Demand you go to art class for an outlet? You will wander the halls, listening to the voices all around you. Talking to you. At you. Inside you. Until you find a corner with a chair that no one else wants. Find a corner that is yours and when someone else sits there, you will shriek. Uncontrollably, inconsolably, your body arched violently backward until they slam a needle into the flesh that you try to tear off.
What will you do once the door of your room is closed shut? Your wrists and ankles restrained to the bed. What will happen as the chemicals begin to choke your thoughts and all you know is that little patch of sky in the high window? How inhumane, how cruel to show any signs of the outside world, and yet you will be thankful every day that you can stare out. Into the porthole of life illuminated hard and blue by a sun you cannot see or feel. What time? What month? You would willingly trade your soul and body just to know the season. As you lie alone, you will think you can see the flecks of the year’s first snow. You will open your mouth to the birth of these sweet cold drops, only to find them turning to blood on your tongue. And in the final seconds before sleep steals your mind. Not conscious. Not unconscious. Not life. Not death. This suspended place and moment. Where snow tastes of blood. What will you do in this middle place?
This place that reeks of urine and bleach, iron, and fermenting bodies. This middle place. So heavy. So ripe. With despair.
Spring
The silence hunches over me in my dreams, a phantom heavy on my chest. The taste of blood is thick in my mouth. The gum-tight feel of it on my face. A confusion of memories crowds into my mind as I open my eyes, my back aching from being curled into a shivering ball on the floor. I stare at the photographs above the mantel, mocking me. Stupid girl. Stupid crazy girl. Just like your mother. I sit up slowly and gingerly touch the dried, caked blood under my nose. Outside, the clouds are just beginning to streak with the first red and orange of the rising sun. Miraculously, the sun splits open the sky to another day. Streaks of orange and crimson red and then high above, the stars still flickering, but in between are all the shades. Blue pierces my heart.
The breaking horizon is the color of my father’s eyes. The last time he opened them before he died. All his life, he had called them hazel. Said they changed with the times, the seasons, the clothes he wore, the mood he was in. But the last time he opened his eyes to look at me sitting by his hospital bed, the last time, they were the blue of heavens and oceans. Forget-me-nots. And then he left me. Alone. Holding only a broken promise to always be there for me. He left me an orphan.
I rock back and forth, holding myself. Dad, I miss you. I miss you so much. I don’t want to live anymore, Daddy. I can’t live anymore. I don’t know how to live anymore. Without you.
The shadows move across the floor. How long have I been sitting on the floor, watching the day open and pass? I begin to hear Dad moving in the kitchen. Telling me how the next round of trials will make significant changes for patients. For sufferers. How he has a new trail on Mom. Some grainy video of a woman buying a bus ticket and
