It’s the most painful reminder that I don’t have that many friends in New York. Not real friends. Everyone in New York claims that they’re your friend: the person you met at dinner, who’s a friend of someone else at the dinner, or the friend of your good friend. The person you met at a work event in the bathroom while washing your hands and who said they liked your dress. The person who never said they liked your hair in the line at the coffee shop, but asked enough questions about it to suggest that maybe they did. The person you worked with for a while in an office full of people you barely recognised as people and you thought seemed human by comparison. The bartender you over-tipped because you were out-of-your-skull drunk, which always makes you more needy and more generous. The person you shared a Twitter exchange with and has ‘NYC’ in their location and whom you didn’t immediately despise and you’re pretty sure they didn’t despise you either. The British person you definitely wouldn’t be friends with at home, but here the fact that you share a passport is catapulted to a top-five compelling reason to be friends. The girl who gives you diet pills from Mexico, because she knows how much you hate yourself and can help with finding new ways to hurt yourself. The guy you went on a terrible date with and it didn’t work out but you absolutely had to stay friends. Everybody in New York is obsessed with making friends, with collecting them, like the bones a dog will dig up around the neighbourhood and bring back like treasures, burying them afresh, guarding them possessively even though they never are brought out into the light again.
Every dinner ends with ‘Oh my God, we absolutely must meet up’ or ‘Let’s swap numbers’ or ‘Here’s my email’, every unexpected meeting with, ‘We are going to be BEST friends’ and ‘I’m so glad you came to New York’. The first few times this happens, I’m surprised that my phone doesn’t vibrate or my email ping. Wait. They didn’t mean it? New York is full of small, insignificant moments that will be carried away in the wind around you. Nothing sticks. Nothing stays. Nothing’s solid.
The next morning, I’m off to take part in poetry class. As I leave my room to join the others, the male nurse walks past, the one who has called me The Princess of England since I was admitted.
‘Today you look like Fifth Avenue, like Audrey Hepburn,’ he says. ‘But I ain’t mad at you.’
I take this as a compliment and use it to buoy me for the morning, so desperate am I for human warmth. As I start another week on the ward I can feel the despair, the panic, mounting: when will I go home? In two days, two weeks, two months? I know all are possible.
I have my second AA meeting; this one is led by Big John, who towers over the room but shrinks whenever he talks about the pain he’s been through. This time, for the first time, I speak. I say, ‘My name is Terri and I’m an alcoholic,’ though my tongue trips on the words. I feel like such a fake. My stories, though true, feel like fiction. Like I’m weaving a fantastical tale. I can’t really have a problem, can I?
My next appointment with the doctor is tomorrow. I spend much of the night on my knees, praying and praying that he’ll realise that it’s time for me to go home. I get up and am ready in plenty of time for our meeting. I say that I’m sorry, that I’m grateful, that I will always be thankful to them for saving me and that now was the time for me to go home, didn’t they agree?
The doctor nods lightly, but the words coming out of his mouth are not what I want to hear.
‘You seem to be doing well,’ he says. ‘But we can’t get ahead of ourselves, can we? Let’s aim for the end of the week.’
He may as well have said never. I try to feel grateful that it is at least this week, but I don’t feel grateful, I feel pissed off. Not that I can show it. I say thank you, shake his hand, and am back on the ward in ten minutes, shaking my head, to tell them I’m not getting out today.
There are, though, a clutch of patients being sent home today, including The Screamer and Daniel. The former is over the moon to go home, sitting with her bags packed from the moment she heard the good news. Daniel is subdued and sad. He will have to go back to his life on the streets, his life of homelessness, addiction and mental illness. He talks about trying to get into a hostel, have a safe place to sleep, to live well, and I hope more than anything that he finds these things.
‘Would you like to get dinner with me? After you’re out?’ he asks, and I say yes, knowing it’s a date I will never make.
After the leavers have gone, we spend an hour examining Hamlet’s monologue. It seems like such a pointless exercise. Half of the patients can’t understand it. I’m bubbling over with frustration. Even before Mary, the evangelical Christian who carries a Bible full of Post-it notes in her hands at all times, shouts randomly, aimlessly, at us about scripture and eternal damnation and hell. You’re already there, baby, I think. What in hell could be worse than this?
I have all my hopes on
