Page 62 of The Truths We Burn

I drop my tongue out, showing the nurse the inside of my mouth, swiping my tongue from left to right, up and down. She shines the small pen light around, nodding once she is satisfied.

After three weeks inside of the Monarch Mental Health Institution, I stopped refusing the medication.

The side effects, loss of appetite, constant fatigue, migraines, they’re better than the alternative.

Everyone has this image of what they think a psychiatric ward looks like. Pop culture and movies have given a pretty damning image. The stigma surrounding these places is pretty horrid. I mean, everyone and their mother watched season two ofAmerican Horror Story.

I’m sure there are facilities that focus on helping patients, treating their issues and giving them hope for rehabilitation and an eventual release back into the real world.

But this is Ponderosa Springs.

And this is my life, and anytime fate can throw me to the wolves, it absolutely will.

This place is everything your craziest nightmares could conjure up.

A gated prison with padded rooms and no doorknobs.

They tell you when you get here, willingly or in my case unwilling, that everything they do is to help you.

That the straps that held me down on the stretcher when I arrived were to protect me. Their job is to keep me safe with their white lab coats and clipboards.

Even when you refuse to take your medication and they drag you to solitary confinement, where three men will hold you down and inject you with antipsychotics. Even when they keep you there for three days without a word.

They will sit you down on their plastic couches and tell you this asylum, this place, was built to help you. All of this is for your own good.

All the while they ask you over and over, and over and over again, why did you try to kill yourself? Do you feel like harming yourself now? Are you sure? Are you absolutely positive you’re not having bad thoughts?

God help you if you say yes—even when I was first admitted, I knew better than to say yes to those questions.

Sadly, though, the doctors and nurses are right.

They are there to keep us safe and secure.

Not to actually treat us for our underlying mental health or do anything really that requires them to go out of their way to better our lives.

A crow soars across the morning sky, the grayish clouds tethering into its wings as it swoops close to the trees. My nose starts to run from the air that’s nipping at my skin. January is always the coldest here.

Beyond the steel gates that keep the grounds secure, there is a river that you can see from the garden. Well, it’s more dead weeds and broken fountains, but I’m sure at some point, there were flowers planted here somewhere.

“You have visitors waiting for you in the dining hall.” One of the nurses on day shift, Shonda I think her name is, stands above me where I sit on the moist ground.

The cold dew clings to my faded blue scrubs, but I enjoy the feeling. Inside, you don’t feel anything. Not even temperature. Everything is middle ground and numbing.

For a few moments in the morning, I sit out here and actually feel like a human being. I listen to the crows squawk, the river rustle slowly, and the wind howl as it makes the trees groan.

Inside those walls, there are no bad days, no good days.

Just days.

Purposeless.

Time is irrelevant. It’s either a blur or a racetrack. I never know when I’m sleeping or when I’m awake. The shitty thing is when I am awake, all I wanna do is sleep.

If senior year me could see the person I am now, she’d fucking stroke out. Nails bitten to the quick, permanent purple bags beneath my eyes.

I’m no longer who I used to be, and honestly, I never found out who I wanted to be. So that leaves me cemented in limbo.

Lost.