“It’s like a storm.”
“What is?”
“My thoughts,” I say, blinking away tears. “I get like this and… I just… I can’t… It overwhelms me.”
She simply nods and writes down something on her clipboard. Her laminate says her name is Susan. My eyes drift to the floor again.
“Have you ever done this before?” Her voice is soft and comforting. I don’t know how she can keep that tone, doing what she does. She deals with possibly hundreds of basket cases a month, and still she is trying to sound compassionate.
I ask, “Been interviewed by a nurse?” My eyes don’t even lift from the tiles on the floor. Nine gray ones surrounded by sixteen white ones. It repeats through the room. I count every single one to keep my mind from running amok.
“I meant have you attempted suicide before?”
My nose is running now. I can’t breathe through it anymore. Susan must have heard me sniffling because she hands me a tissue. I blink back more tears as I accept it and blow my nose loudly.
I nod.
“Could you tell me what happened?”
I gasp for air a little before I start talking again. I finish counting the nine gray tiles and manage to speak. “About a month ago I took a handful of Tylenol PM.”
She asks softly, “Were you trying to kill yourself?”
“Yeah.” I sigh heavily. I can’t seem to get enough oxygen. “But it didn’t work. I only passed out and woke up feeling sick. I just…” I trail off.
“Yes?”
“I just want to go to sleep and never wake up. I don’t want to cut myself; I don’t want to shoot myself. I don’t want any more violence. I am tired of violence.” I sob a little and she offers me another tissue. “I want to go to sleep. Nice and quiet and peaceful.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
I shake my head. “No. When I woke up and I wasn’t dead, I was too ashamed to tell anyone. My dorm mate didn’t even realize.”
Susan writes some more. I manage to pry my eyes away from the floor to look up at the pale, dirty, damaged walls. The buzzing of the florescent lights above us is the only sound in-between my occasional deep breaths.
Susan coos, “What happened this time?”
I wipe fresh tears from my face. My throat hurts from talking and sobbing. “I just want to go to sleep.”
“I know, honey. It’s late. But we need to know what happened before we give you a room.” Susan is silent for a while, just letting me count the gray and white tiles again.
She finally breaks the silence. “Who brought you here?”
I shut my eyes to block out the tiles. “My dorm mate. Roger. He found me emptying out bottles of pills on my desk. When he saw me and asked what I was doing I… I started crying.”
“What pills?”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “Tylenol PM, Nyquil, Ibuprofen, and Claritin.”
She nods and writes on her clipboard again. I try to fight back the thought that maybe those pills wouldn’t have even really killed me? Maybe Susan knows this. She must think I’m pathetic, taking pills that couldn’t possibly be dangerous to hurt myself. She probably thinks I was taking pills just for the attention.
She says, “Were you going to take more of those pills?”
I nod. “Yeah. I was going to choke down as many as I could. Make sure the job was done this time.”
I wipe at my nose some more. I count the tiles again.
Then she says, “How long have you been depressed?”
I try to avoid her question without talking. I don’t want to admit to myself how long this has been happening. The buzzing of the lights starts to bore into my skull. I fidget uncomfortably in the silence.
“Can you remember when this started?” Susan clarifies, “When you started being like this?”
When did this all start? I try to focus, to think back.
“I can’t remember a time I wasn’t like this,” I admit. “For a long time, I thought it was normal. I thought it was what people were like. How they felt.”
She writes some more on her board. Panic wells up inside me. Suddenly the room is too pale, too small. The reality of the situation catches up to me. The air is thick in my lungs.
“I don’t think I should be here,” I say. My hands grip the edge of the plastic seat beneath me.
“You need help.” Susan breaks from her calm demeanor to be urgent for a moment. “This has gotten out of hand for you. We’re here to get you well.”
“I can’t do this. I had a bad week; I’ll get better.” I feel foolish just being here. Why did I let Roger convince me to get into the car? I say, my speech is rushed and uncertain, “It’s always like this. I get bad for a while and then it gets better. I’ll be fine.”
Susan stares at me firmly.
Did I say something wrong?
Her eyes soften, but her face stays resolute. “You have two suicide attempts in a month. If I let you leave, you’ll try again in a few weeks. Next time you might succeed. You have an opportunity right now to get the aid you need. This sounds like a pattern. You do well and then you do poorly. Poorly enough to attempt to kill yourself. Those are symptoms,” she says. “There’s something bigger than just a suicide attempt happening to you. I believe it will only lead to you harming yourself in some way in the future.”
Her words hit me but I can only shrug. “Wouldn’t I have kept trying to kill myself? I mean, I stopped after the first try. Maybe I just would have gotten my wits about me and decided to not do it.”
She puts the clipboard down. I see some of what she has been writing. Things like ‘Suicidal Ideation’ and ‘Racing Thoughts’. The rest I can’t decipher.
“That’s not how these things normally play out,” Susan says. “Suicide attempts can be days or months apart because it takes a lot of effort to build yourself into the frame of mind to do that. I don’t want to take the chance that you might just magically get better. I’ve seen a lot of cases come in here, and not a one ended that way.”
My eyes sting. I count the tiles again. Twenty-five tiles in each square. Nine gray ones surrounded by sixteen white ones. If the desk weren’t in the way I could count how many times that pattern repeated. It irritates me a little that I have an incomplete count.
My voice falters as I say, “I don’t think I can get better. I don’t think this will go away. I’ve tried everything.”
“Have you tried getting help?” she asks firmly.
I fall silent.
Susan folds her hands in front of her. “Listen, honey. I think this is best for you, but I can’t sign you in unwillingly. This is entirely voluntary. Our mental health department is excellent, and has done a lot of good for a lot of people. I believe they can help you.”
My mind gets blurry for a moment as a rush of new thoughts crash over me. The storm thunders in my head, with a booming chorus of “you can’t trust these people!” and “they don’t care about you!”
I remember Roger is waiting outside in the emergency room. Or maybe he had left. It had been a few hours of waiting before I got to see somebody. He might have been tired and went back to campus.
What if I can’t leave? Who could I call at this time of night?
A million questions thrash around in my head, all distracting from what I should really be thinking about.
“I can’t afford treatment,” I say. My voice is hoarse from trying to hold back the torrents of arguments against hospital admittance.
“We can put you on charity care. You would simply have to provide some paperwork and sign a few documents. It’s an easy process… Someone will even help walk you through it.”
Susan waits, but clearly senses my tension. She sighs heavily and leans in closer.
She says, “You said your mind is like a storm?”
I nod slowly.
“Well… storms pass. This will all pass, too. Whatever you are feeling isn’t forever. And with proper medication and treatment, you could prevent yourself from ever getting this bad again. I promise.”
I can’t fight anymore. I am too tired. I just want to sleep. I just want to not feel like this anymore. So, I look up and finally look her in the eyes.
“I won’t feel like this again?”
She smiles, a soft small smile. “If you follow your treatment, it will remove the risk of feeling like this again. Yes.”
I think for a moment, my mind calming long enough for me to make the decision.
“I need help.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR – Jack M. spent his formative years in the bitter north of New England. Nowadays, when he isn’t creating, he enjoys stumbling and tumbling into hilarious internet memes.