In Limbo

The analog clock placed above the doorway read 11:00am. Julie lied idly on a hospital bed, hooked up to a plethora of monitors and an IV bag. Her long blonde hair, which was normally brushed neatly into a low ponytail, was sprawled across the pillow. She looked up at the ceiling because she could not stand to look at her surroundings, for that would confirm her reality. She counted the tiles on the ceiling over and over again because there was nothing else for her to do.

“Ms. Camden?”

Julie looked over to her left where the doctor was standing at the door.

“How are you doing today?”

Julie scoffed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but how would you be if you were in my position?”

The doctor gave a polite smile. “I am not sure,” he said carefully. “Why don’t you tell me?” He shuffled to a chair beside Julie’s bed and sat down. He took out a notebook from the breast pocket of his white coat as well as an expensive-looking pen, and clicked it. The doctor appeared youthful. He had thick brunette hair arranged in an attractive pompadour. Julie was unsure whether or not he was an attending because she hadn’t—she couldn’t have been paying attention.

Julie fidgeted with her fingers. “Not too good,” she mumbled. Her fidgeting called her attention back to her hands, the very thing she was trying to avoid, and she stared at the tight bandages on her wrists.

The doctor stared at her intently, careful to maintain the blank affect that had been so emphasized in his training. “And why is that?” he questioned.

“I know you are just doing your job and I don’t want to be any more of a nuisance than I already am, but c’mon. You can guess why you wouldn’t be doing so good.” Tired of her reality, she averted her gaze to the weeping willow that sat just outside of her window.

“Julie,” the young doctor patiently began in a voice just above, “I know this whole ordeal must be…” he trailed off.

Julie wiggled her legs under the blankets. “Annoying,” she averred. “This whole ordeal is annoying.”

“I understand. I want you to know that my colleagues and I are all here to help you. We are all here to help you get back on track, okay?” He did not wait for a response. “Now, can you tell me when the suicidal ideation started?”

“Real subtle.”

“I’m sorry,” he grimaced, breaking his sangfroid. “I should have been more sensitive. I know this is hard for you, but in order for me to help you, I have to know the full breadth of the situation.”

Julie inhaled. “It—” she started. “It never really stopped. It happened less, but it never went away. Sometimes I would really be enjoying myself and I’d think, ‘This is it. This is what I have been searching for all of my life.’ And then I’d go home and sit with myself and realize what I am and what I’ve always been and the thoughts would come back again.”

The doctor quickly finished scrawling something on his notepad, and looked up at Julie whose beauty was concealed by her waifish appearance. “And what is that?”

“Nothing much,” Julie asserted. “Nothing much at all.”

“Could you elaborate?”

At this point, Julie was annoyed, very visibly so, she thought. She sat with her lips pursed and her foot bobbing back and forth. The doctor, however, did not know how to interpret her body language. Once that doctor entered the four walls of the hospital, he removed every iota of any colloquial knowledge from his head and reduced himself to his title. He saw Julie’s bobbing foot and pursed lips and thought not discomfort, but methodically parsed through years worth of teaching. Bouncing leg, he wrote. Anxiety? Hyperactivity, perhaps?

“My entire life, I have been searching,” Julie sighed. “I have been searching for wholeness. I have only ever wanted to be whole, but I have never been close. I would look at my friends as a kid and, y’know, watch everyone having a good time. The girls I was friends with—and I use the word ‘friends’ loosely—would be giggling and I would be right there with them, right there with them, and I never felt much. I mean, of course I was giggling too because it would have looked weird to not be giggling in a group of giggling girls, but there was nothing beneath that. Nothing at all.

“That has been the entirety of my life. I do what I am supposed to do. I went to college and got a job and made a couple of friends and entered and exited a couple of relationships, y’know? I have done all of the works and still there is nothing. But sometimes the nothingness is so oppressive, so damn consuming. It is like I am drowning, and I know that is cliche, but it is true. It feels as if a wave comes crashing over me, and there is nothing for me to do except surrender to it. And when that wave hits, I will visit my shrink if I realize it quick enough, but that doesn’t always happen.” Julie laughed dryly. “Certainly not this time.”

Julie looked back at the doctor who was writing something on his notepad once again and wondered what he was writing. This would happen often, in her therapy appointments and when she ended up in the hospital. She would bare her soul out to a doctor, which was cathartic and nice and unburdening until she would remember that she was baring her soul to someone. Then it was just uncomfortable.

“And by ‘nothingness,’ could you be more specific?” he asked politely. “Is it an absence of pleasure or a limited range of emotions or something else entirely?”

Julie exhaled loudly. “It’s nothing. An absence of everything. I’d die to feel anything,” she blurted before realizing that is exactly what she attempted to do. The doctor carefully took something down on his notepad and opened his mouth to say something, but Julie interrupted.

“Look, Doc. I have been here before,” Julie softly spoke. “I know the deal. Just give me Prozac or whatever and I will be okay in a month or two. There is no need to go through the whole rigamarole of what I am feeling this time because it never changes, not really. I feel the same as I did the last time I was here, and the time before that, and the time before that. So, just prescribe the pills and we can be done with all of this, huh?”

The doctor looked at Julie patiently. “I understand that you must be frustrated—”

“You don’t understand shit,” Julie hissed. “I’m sorry to be harsh, but don’t give me that. You don’t understand shit. I know this because if you did, you wouldn’t be here asking me to describe what I am feeling and assessing my fucking symptoms. If you understood, really understood what I’m feeling, you’d be in the next room with your wrists slit, too. Don’t give me that bullshit, please don’t.”

A brief embarrassment flashed over the young doctor’s face, but he quickly regained his composure and scrawled something on his notepad.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Julie said in a hushed tone. “I just don’t know what to do anymore. Every moment of calm that I have ever experienced has been tainted with the dread of the nothingness returning.” She paused for a moment, surprised at her own honestly, and laughed. “How fucked is that?”

The doctor hummed in acknowledgement, waiting to see if Julie would continue.

She toyed with the bandages on her hand. “I don’t know how other people do it. I mean, everything is just so damn hard. I just can’t take it. There has yet to be a year in my adult life where I haven’t thought, ‘You know what? I quit.’ It’s just all too much.”

The doctor took a long inhale. “I’m sorry that you are feeling this way, Ms. Camden. We are going to do everything we can to get you better.”

The doctor proceeded to rattle off his treatment plan: yet another SSRI, a mood stabilizer, and a benzodiazepine–only until she was discharged–to quell her irritation. But Julie wasn’t listening. As the doctor spoke, she retreated into her head. She went to her childhood home, and started tending to the large vegetable garden in her backyard. There, her mother was still alive and beautiful, and started to help her pick the ripe tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. Life was simple there. She would eventually be ripped from her reverie and have to face her reality, but for those few moments she was fine. For those few moments, life had luster again.