Someone screams in the room across the hall,
His fever blasting into me with a mad resonance.
So afraid, we are all so afraid of the mint green hallways,
This zoo that M.C. Escher built.
“Do you understand that you are in an urgent care facility?” the nurse asks.
I nod urgently. I do now.
The doors to this hospital are locked, but I don’t know that yet.
I vibrate and twitch and chase my words around, trying to gather them in careful piles, like autumn leaves in a constant wind.
I answered all the questions honestly, so of course I’m igniting rows of little red lights on their warning panel.
Yes, I wanted to kill someone.
I have created a situation for them. They are now in damage control mode.
Yes, I hear voices.
In fact, that’s what I came here to talk about if…
No, I’m not planning on killing myself.
The voices have names.
No, I don’t know where the scars came from.
Sometimes I get really confused and the phone just scares the shit out of me.
No, I don’t know what day it is.
I don’t mention the animals, or my sister, or the blackouts, or use the term “occult”;
Poor woman’s so busy with all the other blinking red lights.
She doesn’t know the terror of having to choose the One True breakfast cereal at the grocery store.
They’re always talking, you see.
Romero says we should just get the fuck out of there.
We can take her. “You get the ankles and I’ll get the wrists.”
The nurse studies her notes and then retrieves a doctor.
The doctor offers her help in exchange for my agreeing to take some pills.
Damage control. Damage control.
Bottled fog to squash the voices.
The pills will make the doctors certain they are speaking only to me.
I came here drowning and they are throwing me Life Savers candy.
Can it be a woman? I will only speak with a woman.
Men are untrustworthy, they scare me
Don’t tell me it’s an irrational fear; turn on a TV – it’s just common sense.
I’m afraid of demons too, but that’s probably because of all the exorcisms.
Taran says taking the drugs would be like suffocating your brother with a pillow because he talks too much. Kind of an extreme solution.
A child is sobbing somewhere, but no one else seems to hear.
I come out of “screen saver” mode
To find a new office with a new doctor. A man.
The stagehands are so swift and silent I don’t notice the set changes.
How many times have I done this?
The doctor says I’m “borderline,” on the verge of “going crazy.”
I ask him if that’s the proper psychiatric term for my condition and what warning signs I can expect so when I finally “go crazy” I know when to mail the invitations.
He just shrugs as he takes my money.
Every dollar is a thunderclap when you’re paying someone just to listen.
At home I find sketches of still life and landscapes.
They are all full of faces.
Someone has forged my signature at the bottom of every one of them.
Someone’s been feeding the cats. One less thing I have to do.
The prescription the doctors gave me has vanished.
Someone else has left signs of their passing up and down my arms and legs.
Technically, the wounds are self-inflicted.
I can’t deny those are my fingerprints on the knife.
My friends laugh nervously at my “mood swings”
And we laugh back at them with lonely, angry laughter.
I gave up trying to put the mirror back together since I don’t know its original shape
And honestly, I’m used to my reflection by now.
I dwell in a world of fissures, of dreams within dreams, of time reft and distressed.
The journal of my life has a chasm between ages 3 and 12.
Guess nothing was going on all those years.
Guess I had nothing notable to say.
You could say I have a photographic memory:
Because without the photos there’d be no memories.
I memorize numbers, the answers to complicated questions like
How long were you married?
How long have you lived here?
Haven’t I always been here?
“Am I asleep? Had I slept? Are they my bad dream or am I theirs?”
The first rule of Dissociative Identity Disorder is you do not talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Fuck the rules.
I don’t worry that I’ll wake up as Tyler Durden;
I worry that I’ll wake up as myself
And where’s that guy been?
A lot of people have been asking for him.
He’s been making a lot of collect calls
And signing a lot of checks,
And running up a tab.
And he forgot we were playing hide and seek.
These have got to be the best hiding places because no one’s found us for years.
But we just want to know if it’s safe to come out now.
We just want to be found.