Sink
It’s The Way/
I’ve got these white-hot spots behind my eyes. The kind of heat that claws up from a site of panic, from a dull place in your chest. I’m curled up in the passenger seat of my mom’s minivan. The car’s pumping on, onward, spiraling through the back roads of the San Antonio Medical Center, a beast of metal and shadow. Pounding wails of sirens fill my skull. Got trees lining every road, these green blimps of color, shattering the dark. Streetlamps like glowing teeth, throwing up electric heat on the concrete.
My mother is driving. My therapist made a call. There’s a bed available. This is a good place, she says, the kind of place that can keep me safe until I can keep myself safe. The kind of place that’s gonna keep me. This is what it is to be fifteen, post-attempt: suspended in color, in shame, burning a life apart. This is the burn. Got matches in my head. Can see the whole world lit up, smoldering. And the car, the car is on fire. Everything, on fire. I think I am sobbing, but nothing, nothing will go out. Nothing will still. Nothing will dampen. These pounding wails. This is what it is.
In-take/
Are you thinking of killing yourself? Are you hallucinating? Hallucinating. Seeing things that aren’t there? I need you to sit up, please. Are you—I need you to pay attention. Are you seeing things? Hearing things? Suicidal, homicidal. Okay. Okay. Fill this out. No, no pencil. Pen only. You can’t keep it. The pen. Fill this out. Check the symptoms, just check them, like, a little box.
Depressed mood
Voluntary vomiting
You need to be honest
Hopelessness
Numbness
Yes, sign there. Date. Sign there, on the line.
Initial.
Initial.
Initial.
In-limbo/
The ward has got this music. This culture. Feel it on the first morning, this atmosphere that will grow into me, turn into a branch of my body. That sweet smell of cleaner. The cold air, inescapable under layers of suffocation-proof sheets, mapped with holes. Smiling RNs and techs with white-hot teeth. A psychiatrist who talks but doesn’t listen. My arms are a triggering shade, so I keep my long sleeves on during my first day, trying to keep myself a secret. I’m a secret. Unknown. The staff, they took my shoes. Elopement precautions. Flight risk. I can’t go outside, can’t go play basketball or go to recreational therapy. Can’t go to the cafeteria.
I eat cold trays of food on the unit. Cereal and grape juice. This is what it is.
There are other kids, here, suspended and lifeless or too full of life, living on surges of adrenaline. Kids with burning freckles and frightened eyes. Kids who see faces in the walls, who run around singing, who sit quietly in the dayroom and take stock of their sadness. They are beautiful and warm and full of rage. I know they get it. These children who hold their tongues and teeth, who are manic and depressed and confused and tired, who are straddling the place between life and grief, a hollow pocket of adolescence, fucked up enough to deserve these walls, these limits.
These kids know that the pain is never beyond you; the pain is exactly where you last saw it, last felt it.
In-session/
The psychiatrist comes to see me. Puts me in this little room with beige walls and a dead carpet.
We talk for fifteen minutes.
I’m all,
Yeah, so I wanna die,
I’m all,
because I think that nothing is real,
because I’m trapped in a room and everyone is
watching me, everyone wants me dead.
(I don’t see how I can come back from this,
not right, not fully.)
And he’s all,
Big name, brand name, onetabmorningandnight.
And off I go, into the bottles
into the bottles
into the
Take/
Take the pills in med cups. Like shots. Shot after shot after shot, mouthfuls of rocks, chasers of antipsychotics. Starts off innocent enough, you know, two pills. When they don’t work in those early days, after the chemicals don’t cure the conditions of living, they turn into three, into four.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve done it. Should’ve pleaded the fifth.
Here’s the courtroom: the psychiatrist’s office, full of Lego and puzzle pieces for the younger ward kids, full of worksheets and booklets for the older of us. Full of bottles for everyone. My psychiatrist is the judge, the jury, an attorney on behalf of the tablets on the prescription pad. This is a trial. I am a criminal, but the charges, they elude me. No charges, but the consequences stick. I get sentenced. Every time, I get sentenced. Diagnosed as in need: in need of meds, in need of silence.
On the upper kind of meds—the hot-wire stuff, the live stuff—the unreal thoughts grow louder, fuller. Go fully into delusion, sail into the unreality, this dark storm of nonsense in my mind. On the downers, I sleep without sleeping, go under the surface of myself, emerge in lucid and wild pockets, then get PRN’d, shoved back into unconsciousness.
It’s a dance. Tell the truth, you get spun. Tell a lie, you get spun. Contradict, take a hit. Yeah, you take the hits, stagger, leap for balance. I’m in a song. You know the one? About the kids. How they’re alright, alright. All, (sometimes, I feel I gotta get away) keep your pills, they’re not (bells chime, I know I gotta get away) sitting right in my mind, but there’s (and I know if I don't, I'll go out of my mind) something to be said for the flood, for the chemical wash, for the losses (I'll go out of my—).
Be-leave/
Here’s what doctors/shrinks/DSMs won’t tell you: beyond sites of control, delusion becomes like a prayer. I recite my delusions in my mind, in this godless place. Mantras, truths. Prayers, like delusions, are only something that you believe in so that you can avoid believing in nothing. I am nothing, under the weight of all this belief, a stranger or a phantom. A history, coming undone, erased. I am dying in my youthfulness, a reverse kind of death, returned to ash and dust.
Every pill is a lesson. Every pill, a question. They are all lies and verses and whispers. They fill my body, fill everyone’s bodies, mocking all the hollow veins, the sites of motion in us. All these kids cycle in, cycle out, full of medications with names they can’t pronounce, full of powder and plastic, a means to an end, a profit. Here’s the flood. The place where we all drown, where it all folds in. No way out, no time to find a way out. Here’s where you sink, where you sink, and get told you deserve to.
Conversations/
Even in the water, beneath the choking, I have conversations with my psychiatrist. Only the conversations look like prescriptions. He delivers his words on yellow strips of paper. He delivers his words in orange bottles, in powdered capsules with plastic shells. White words, blue words, peach words. I dump the morphemes into my palm, swallow them. Lift my tongue, cough, prove the blank space to the nurse. Prove the consumption. Prove I’m a participant, that I don’t need any assistance filling my shoes with sand, tying the ball-and-chain around my ankle.
Swallow, and jump in. My ears fill with songs, with colors. My eyes, my limbs, go d-e-a-d. That feeling, that drugged-out feeling, of your whole body going beyond your control, of melting into the floor: you don’t know a fear like that. Peace like that.
The delusions persist. Even underwater. I do not speak to my psychiatrist. But sometimes, on those uppers, I sing. Hey, don’t let the psychiatrist hear a word of it. Don’t let him. Cover his ears, keep him away. He may choose what goes in my body, but it’s none of his fucking business what leaves—my words, my voice, my song.
Things I Want To Ask The Psychiatrist, But Don’t/
Is it safe? Addictive? Will it taste like metal, eggs, copper? What happens if I stop it?
What happens if I stop? What happens— Too many birds on a clothesline make the whole thing sink: will I sink? I rattle with pills. Shake with pills. So many pills.
Is this normal? Are you normal? Is this how psychiatrists are?
Why does it matter if I want to kill myself/
how will a pill make life more liveable?
Are these pills approved by the FDA? Are these pills approved by God?
Did you pull them out of Hell, these bottles?
Are there dead vowels at the back of
my throat that these pills might clear out? Might shake loose?
You look young: are you qualified? Are you frightened?
Do you imagine the ways that these medications
will shape our minds,
bruise our bodies?
Are you
hopeful?
Do you read
poetry? Do you
think that the kids
are alright?
A Conversation With My Body As I Withdrawal from Klonopin/Zyprexa/Risperdal/etc./and Start The Latest Shit/
Be still. No mo
re shake s.
Keep c hi ll, k
eep co ol.
Ca-lm. C alm-a. H old
your fing ers like sticks.
No t r em o rs. Give me calmmm.
Keep the h e a t down
Turn it all down.
Don’t lay down.
Don’t lay down.
Don’t lay d o w n.
You’ll go
under.
Target/
Hear those wails in the distance. Those sirens, traces of the outside. Two weeks in, four pills deep. Know insurance will drop me soon, but that’s fine. That’s all fine, all good, all fine. I’ll circle back, get stuck in the revolving door, like all these poor kids circle back, pulled into the orbit of psychotropia, this absent planet. They say we’re killing ourselves. But the cycling. The cycling, the frequent flight through the waves, is what kills.
Ex-take/
Come on. Stop the pills. I can’t keep doing this. Let it kill me. Sure. I’ll withdraw, I’ll withdrawal, let it kill me. There is so much powder in me. Light a match close, I’ll blow. Light a match. Burn me up. Weeks. These pills, they’ve eaten me for weeks. They’ve eaten my weeks. Made time vanish. Everyone who loves me has vanished. What I remember of myself, of my hope: it’s all gone. Let me go. Stop this. Let me go. I’ll swim, I’ll paddle, I’ll kick until I can’t. I promise. It’s all gone. I promise, I promise.
Things I Won’t Let My Psychiatrist Know/
I know his responses come in the form of pills, so I won’t tell him.
How I got fire in my stomach, and how the fire is the same thing as the shame.
How nothing chemical can melt the edges of this guilt out.
How these other kids here don’t need meds—they need someone to love them,
they need their brothers and sisters and parents to stop being dead,
they need someone to feed them more than what they’re getting in their home,
they need their house to have not gotten broken into,
they need their uncle to have never come into their bedrooms,
they need their teacher to tell them they’re not stupid,
they need their mother to tell them they’re not stupid,
they need to feel the sun on their faces,
they need a kiss on the forehead,
they need a laugh,
they need a hand,
they need someone to listen when they speak.
I won’t tell him that as I watch these kids melt, die within themselves, I forecast my own perishing. I won’t tell him that I know, even now, that I am going to spend my life carrying the leaving of this place. That the future will only ever exist in reflection to this building, to this distance, to this tireless kick for the surface.
And I won’t tell him my heart, the only memory that lingers—that I learned how to swim at my community’s Y. Four years old, in the glowing linoleum of a building larger than the grocery store. That the swim instructor held me underwater to teach me to keep my air close, to hold it inside of me. That in the panic, I felt my breath leave me, hard leave me, for the first time. But the instructor told me it would save me in the end. To know how to hold it all. The way the meds, the walls, they will save me in the end. They will hold me. Hold it all.
I won’t tell my psychiatrist that the rise to the surface, to safety, felt as terrifying as sitting under the cool blueness of the pool, collapsing into the chlorine and light. No, no. I will hold my words. Keep my air inside me. And when the water rises enough to win, to suck me in and steal me, then my breath, my voice—it’ll come out as a siren. As a wail.