Ghosts of Chemicals

I had, at best, a love-hate relationship with the past. Maybe a shy away from for months and then one night obsessively think over relationship with the past is more accurate. There were reasons why I didn't talk about it. Reasons why I told myself I was moving on, when that wasn't quite what I was doing. I was going through the motions. I had a steady job now. I had bought a new wardrobe of flashy, clunky, geeky clothes including yellow button-up shirts I could wear with a white tank top underneath, and lots of jeans I spray-painted and splattered with acrylic paints and a pair of bright yellow Doc Martins. I liked yellow because it was obtusely loud. It was my own thing. I'd worked so hard on crafting my new physical appearance. I'd cut my hair. It looked cute and modern. It's now been 7 months since I got out of the hospital. It's now been exactly a year since I moved away from my previous out-patient clinic in a city I will not name, in a white-walled, squeaky clean facility where they did horrible things to me.

I go to work at a designated place each day of the week. For a designated time. I flash meaningful smiles at customers. Maybe some have very hard lives, and a genuine smile can save them, if but for a moment. I walk home, through streets in a brand new city, a fresh start, a world of opportunity. This is my first year as an adult. This is my first year reclaimed. There are a million things I could get into, now, about the past. Each year for the past 8 years of my life before this one, feels like a horror movie, or a series of horror movies, each month holding its own morbidly fascinating tales of the things I survived. I'm not going to put all of it here. Mostly, it would take too long. It is endlessly complex. What I can share, let alone remember, are bits and pieces. Me talking to a girl a year older than me who was swaying, side to side, in a hospital hallway, mumbling and not making much sense. Me turning into that girl and worse. Me fearing being locked up forever. Me getting out of the mental ward and other things even worse continuing on in a life that was only fascinating because of how sad, how inhumane it was.

The injections. That was the worst of it. The attitudes of those in uniform weren't super great either. But being enslaved to a chemical that was not even legal for human beings, under the cover of a proper medication. That was what it was like for me to be alive.

Memory 1: I am sitting in a blank room in the youth mental ward which is known as several capital letters smashed together. It sounds like a word. I will not repeat the acronym here, in case anyone is familiar with the facility and holds sensitive memories of their own. I am sitting here, it's my first day. My journal has been taken away to be analyzed. They have taken my pink plastic ukulele away and say the doctor will determine when I am ready for it. I sit here and stare out the window that has blinds on it that get in the way of the daylight, and which I can't remove.

Memory 2: I am sitting in the car, in the passenger's side. My mom is driving me home from the hospital, where I go every day to attend a day-program. I can feel nothing. I have no emotions. My very state, 24/7 is of total invading, involuntary numbness. I do not ever feel happy. I wish I could cry, for so many reasons. Yet I cannot.

Memory 3: I decide to not take the fucking pills. I have the sense to tell everyone, my family, the nurse at that point and time who is my nurse. I spend the first day in a state of extreme hunger and sleep deprivation, having not slept the night before, my mind whirring like a mechanical object. I do not sleep the second night. I spend the second day in bed.

Slowly I lose the ability to talk. I am with my parents in the kitchen. I try to form a sentence. The words come out slanted, if that is possible to imagine. They are at an angle.

“What was that, honey?” my mom asks.

I repeat the sentence again. Only it's just words and bits of words I am trying to stick together but unable to. I cannot comprehend how to form an organized statement comprised of coherent thoughts. They send me to the hospital 2 days later.

It is present time. It is July, 2022. I am rollerskating at the roller rink in the city where I now live. There's a disco ball going. Lights flash in images of bright bubbles. The remixed version of Pumped Up Kicks is playing, loud enough for it to feel intense. Loud in the way I can never get music on my headphones to be. I tell myself I am happy now. I have escaped everything. I feel more like a doll who's limbs are being moved in the right positions to show happiness. Why is it taking so long? I wonder. Why is it taking so long for me to feel like me?

I skate for an hour and a half and then find myself talking to the guy who works there. He's cute. I would never. But I enjoy flashing my new beauty around; the soft, shiny hair, the white teeth. The fact that I look like a normal, competent, attractive person. I walk out of the skating rink alone, feeling empty inside.

Memory 4: In the hospital for the second time. In the adult unit. I am a disaster. I shit myself this morning. My body isn't behaving properly. The bathroom was full and had a line up of 7 people. I had to wait, being viewed by everyone, in my own feces, for a long enough period of time for my anxiety to feel like torture. Like bombs going off beneath the surface. There's a young man who gets locked in his room pretty much 24/7 by the staff here. His name is Andy. He doesn't talk, but moans through a guttural voice, “Eeeeee-yeeeee-yeeeeeeeee!”

Memory 5: I am scuttling like a crab across the hallway of the mental ward. My limbs are contorting, tripping me up. One of the doctors said what I have is not schizophrenia. It's not even a mental illness. Yet I am here. I am here.

Memory 6: At last a woman with glasses and tan skin, who scowled at me and gave me the hand earlier that morning when I was following her around for no apparent reason, comes into my room with my parents. She explains that they're placing me on injections of some kind. They've already seen a big difference with the pill form of this medication. They're going to give me a higher dose. She gives me some forms and explains that I am legally bound. Refusing this medication is not an option. I receive my first injection there in the hospital and I do not feel better. I feel as though pillows have been stacked on top of my brain. Repressing its energy. Its activity. Later, the months will go by. And I'll gain the ability to speak. Everyone will say I've 'gained self-awareness,' confident in their opinion that I didn't have it before. What I have gained is the ability to function. What I have gained is a solitary confinement of chemicals that make me throw up in the morning, and feel so unnatural throughout my body, crawling around my bloodstream, that I swear I am being poisoned.

I walk home to my apartment. Ghost Busters is on, on TV, so I microwave some popcorn and watch that. I begin to feel a little better. My body feels like my own now. Though the leftovers of the chemicals are still in there, and might be for another few years. I fall asleep to the final anthem of the movie and the credits rolling, the feeling of victory at the end.

The next day it's raining. I'm reading a book. I take luxury in being able to do that. It was impossible, even a year ago.

The doorbell rings.

Susan stands on my front porch. A woman I met in the facility I stayed in, through my third psychotic episode where it was actually, finally properly treated. She's in her usual purple sweater. Her glasses. Her greying hair. She looks so serious, and not the least bit out of place, like somehow she owns everything. I laugh out loud.

“I have a message for you, dear,” she says.

I gesture for her to come in. She won't come in. She was always like this. I hope, at least, this message is conveyed in a manner of speaking I can understand. Susan has clairvoyance. She sees the future. She was right, when we stayed in hospital, about so many things, but sometimes her manner of speech was so confusing. She'd say things like 'Someone interviewed you.' And 'you're taller than I am,' in response to something I said that was entirely unrelated. Yet I always knew she was speaking the truth.

“The drugs you were on,” she says. It hits me. “They weren't medication.”

Suddenly a bullet frees itself from my skull and I can breathe again. She explains what it was. I feel it is a mercy, because I know now. I ask her to come in again. She politely refuses. And then walks, leaning slightly on one of her legs more than the other, away down the road. I wonder if I will ever see her again. I vow, to the air and to the rain and to the wind, to always think of her as a true friend.

A week passes and I wonder about hiring private investigators. They could go into that old clinic where I was once a patient. They could find things.

Another week passes, and I find myself feeling better, somehow, on my own. What's the difference between justice and revenge? Can justice sometimes take that darker form? I go back and forth about it. Technically, I have the money. I could go to court over this. I have no doubt these people were criminals. I have no doubt they belong in jail.

And yet a subtle peace comes over me that night. I look out the great living room window at several stars, peaking out of the darkness. Everything is already perfect. I got what I wanted. I feel like me.