DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

In the Hospital

I was in the mental hospital for the second time, my sophomore year in high school, a fifteen-year-old, after my GPA had dropped to a 1.0 and my doctor’s reaction to the major depression I had undergone (which one might argue was caused by clinical depression and/or my recent breakup with Karl), putting me on Prozac, just hadn’t worked.  The first visit, I remember the crisp feel of the yellowing pages of my copy of Huck Finn that I held, in the homework room; I sat in a cubicle coated with navy and confetti carpet up the sides, crying hysterically because my parents weren’t coming to visit me until that night.  I remember running up to my mother and grabbing her clammy hands, shouting out loud as she entered the doors that I needed to go home, that I couldn’t take being locked up anymore.  I lay awake staring at the linear florescent light outside of my room in the hall. 

The first night of my second hospital visit, I ran my hand over the light blue cement wall, thinking that I just couldn’t handle the cruelty of the kids at school after Karl dumped me, and I was on my own, for real, for the first time in a long time.  Karl was my first boyfriend, and my first love.  We started going out the beginning of freshman year.  He knew everything about me, and I knew everything about him.  We had grown up together.  Karl’s characteristics that stick out most in my mind are his freckles that blanket his nose and the scar by his chin that he got when he fell off of his bike in my alley in third grade.  Everyone at school knew me as Karl’s girlfriend.  I almost didn’t know myself as anyone else.

My first night, around meds time, was the first time I really noticed the other people in the unit.  There were eight other people besides me in the children’s ward.  I was surrounded by other teenagers.  A girl in meds line named Elizabeth told me she was fifteen, too.  The left side of her head was shaved, and the rest was dyed pink.  She had bright green eyes; she told me she wore colored contacts and her real eyes were blue.  She introduced me to a friend of hers that went to her school, Glenbrook North.  Her friend, Peter, had bleached blonde hair and was deaf.  Elizabeth knew sign language and communicated with him while we waited in line for the night nurse to start handing out meds.  Finally the line progressed until it was my turn to take meds, in front of a nurse that wore pink unicorn-covered scrubs.  I swallowed the three big pills and drank a full glass of water.  After meds I sat down on my bed to write.

            Holding on to the past only gets you in trouble in the future, Karl (I named my diary Karl out of spite).  I feel like my heart is about to explode, like I need to get down everything so that I’ll never forget my second hospital experience- so that there will never be a third.  I wrote while sitting on my bed, watching the morning sun rise over the stretch of buildings I could see from the window of my bedroom. 

Poem #5

True love is inevitably complicated,

And under the purple sky I sit, helplessly faded,

Karl is the only guy I have ever dated,

And the only one I know I will have never hated.

When I saw Dan enter the hospital, I was sitting down on the carpet, writing in my journal; a bright purple journal with constellations strewn about the cover and back.  I had written a few poems, gotten down some of my thoughts, and then I heard shouting coming from the front doors. 

            “So are you saying that if I hadn’t gotten in a fight with Mike, you wouldn’t have sent me here?” 

            The smell of body odor filled the air, like someone just walked in the room who hadn’t taken a shower in days.  I recognized Dan even though he hadn’t shaved in a while.  I recognized his voice- masculine, deep, and a little unsure.  He walked in with a man in his fifties or sixties, holding a red and black Bulls duffle bag and a big pillow with a white and navy striped pillow case.

            Dan sat in front of me in Spanish.  He usually wore his Franklin High hoody.  Dan was friends with Karl and I, and I had just met him in high school.  Karl and I spent time with him sometimes on the weekend, but I didn’t know him that well.  I was satisfied with Karl being the guy in my life, before the breakup, but now that he had broken up with me, a huge part of me was missing, and I was too sad to consider that Dan be the guy that could help me get that part back. 

            “I don’t want you getting in trouble like last time,” the man said to Dan, reaching out and holding on to his arm.  “Actions have consequences.  Maybe this time you’ll learn.” 

            When I made eye contact with Dan, he was in the middle of an eye roll, turning the corner across from the nursing station.  I had seen him before he saw me.  At the moment he recognized me, his entire facial expression changed- from rigid to soft, uninterested to surprised. 

            “Jan?  What are you doing here?”  he said, his voice gentle yet aggravated.  He walked up to me the same way he usually did, his shoulders stiff and a little hunched, his gate a little awkward.  He shuffled his feet quickly, one foot in front of the other, like a soldier pacing to a silent beat.  Carol, a staff member, proceeded to roll the empty breakfast cart towards the entrance. 

            At that moment I didn’t know what he’d do next.  Would he groan out loud, in protest of being locked up in here with me?  Or would he just turn around, head to his room and avoid me for the next few days?  I held my breath until he walked up in front of me and held out his hand.  Without thinking, I took it.  It was warm and sweaty, and when I stood up next to him I could see the red veins of his eyes. 

            I tried to say something that seemed mature and confident.  Multiple options of things to say ran through my mind, until I remembered the way I usually greeted him at school. 

            “What’s up, buddy?”  I asked.

            “Not much,” he said, his mouth spreading out into a smile.  There was so much tension between us, but the hospital scene was so much different from school; calmer, more peaceful. 

            “So you like writing?”  he said, pointing to my journal.

            “I guess so- it’s kind of a new thing I do.  It helps me get my mind off of stuff- instead of saying what I feel, I can just write it.  Much simpler.”

            “Wow, how impressive.  So where is the basketball court in this place?”

            The memory of Dan missing the free throw that would have won Franklin High the state championship came back to me.

            “The best I can say is that there is Tetris-” I nodded towards the community room where a television stood in front.  “And I am no good at it.”

            “Let me show you how,” he said as we walked side by side through the hall.  “I am a pro at Candy Crush, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.” 

            I looked Dan in the eyes; they were smiling, yet there surfaced an element of sorrow.  His eyes were the most intense I had ever seen in a guy.  His chin was strong, definite. 

            At that moment, a boy who looked a few years older than me and Dan walked out of his room.  I had heard him bark to a nurse my first night that he wanted to be called Chris, not Christopher.  He had shaggy brown hair and glasses.  He was about as tall as Dan and wore plaid pajama pants, a white t-shirt, and green plastic flip-flops.  As he walked past Dan and I, he shoved his hands in his pockets and smirked nastily at us.  I made a mental note not to talk with him.

            Dan jiggled the door handle that led to the community room a few times; it was locked, so we sat outside of the group room.  Before we sat, I pointed, silently to the schedule posted on the group room door.  Words escaped me; him being the big basketball star at Franklin High. Art was starting in fifteen minutes.  Dan waved goodbye to his Dad, who had been conversing with the nurse at the nursing station near the heavy locking doors.  On the right of us there was a huge window, bordered with wood, with portraits that the patients had colored and painted, that obstructed, partially, our view of what was going on outside- I couldn’t completely see the cars passing by, on a four-lane street (every so often an ambulance would pass by, that I would imagine entered the emergency unit; the sound of the siren absent).  There was some construction going on outside, and the swinging of the crane, which was moving large pieces of concrete, hypnotized me, until Dan snapped me out of it.

            “Sometimes I feel like my whole life is just a big thing of construction,” he said.  I didn’t know if he was joking or not, until he took off his shoe and threw it against the wall.  Normally, if this had been a friend of mine, or a family member, I would have laughed, but I just stayed silent, trying to stifle whatever reaction or facial expression might arise. 

            “You can stay here for a while, and figure out the pieces- you could try to figure out how to fix whatever needs fixing,” I said. 

He looked at me and smiled.

            “Time for new sheets on your beds!” a nurse yelled, passing from room to room, leaning into the doorways of the two- person bedrooms.  Then my best memory of Dan passed through me like electricity.

            Our school was hosting a freshman year overnight retreat.  The classroom my group slept in was a history room- the walls were coated with maps, of China, of Sweden; an old globe was in the corner, the kind that tilted on an axis so that you could turn it.  People weren’t supposed to leave their rooms after ten o’clock, but a lot of people did, including Dan and his friend Brian.  I remember feeling nervous but at the same time not caring (I had just gotten past that “boys have cooties” phase) that Dan and Brian stood outside of the flower-shaped mass of sleeping bags of the girls in my group.  When I recognized him, at that moment, his gaze captivated me.  His eyes were gentle, and his stare singled me out.  It was one of those moments where a boy saw a girl and a girl saw a boy, and lightning struck.  I wish I could have gotten up out of my green and red plaid sleeping bag, and taken him by the hand, but I remember just watching him watching me, feeling awkward because I should have been sleeping. 

            “Are you good at drawing?” Dan asked.  “I remember the sketches you used to draw and stick in the vent of Karl’s locker, freshman year.  He used to show them to everyone.”  The way he said this so nonchalantly bothered me a little. 

            “I haven’t sketched in a while,” I said.  “Can you draw?”

            Dan cocked his head to the side, melodramatically.  “I do…from time to time.”

            Dan took a sketch book out of the backpack I had just noticed he was carrying on his back.  He placed the sketchbook on his lap and took a pencil out of the smaller pouch of the book bag. 

            “Jan, Can I draw you?”  he asked, his cheeks and chin forming a triangle. 

            I blinked fast a few times.  I was really having a conversation with someone from the school that I left behind to feel better.  After me and Karl broke up, I couldn’t handle seeing all of his friends (they were his friends and not mine) ignoring me in the hall.  I remember the day before my mom checked me in the hospital I spent lunch in a bathroom stall, staring down at the white lines between the yellow tiles on the floor, and I held my breath (out of embarrassment) so as not to make any noise, but all of the girls who entered the bathroom, and whoever was outside, still knew it was me in the stall.  Dan was one of the only ones who didn’t react like everyone else did, after Karl humiliated me and dumped me in front of the whole speech class.  And now, a short while later, a new page in my life was being written.

            But I didn’t know what to say to Dan.

            “If you want,” I said, “We don’t have anything else to do.”

            Dan’s eyes were sleepy with happiness.

            “Can I write about you?”  I asked.

            “If you want,” he said.

            As I wrote in my journal, getting down all the memories I had of Dan and Karl, Dan swept his pencil across the page, looking up every so often. We were both in the zone.  After I got a few sentences down, about the day in the cafeteria when Tom started a food fight (“You started it, didn’t you?”  Tom said to Kelly, and she laughed, as they stood a good twenty feet from the Fruitopia machine the day after), I watched him skimming grey lines across the paper, and I got a good look of him.  He was a good six inches taller than me, and he looked attractive.  His toes stuck out from his Nike sandals, and his sleeveless UIC shirt showed off his muscles.

 

            Karl had broken up with me a few days ago.  That day in speech class, I was very tired.  I hadn’t done any homework the night before.  I had stayed up all night listening to IHeart radio, playing solitaire on my computer.  Karl sat across the room from me.  The teacher said we could have free time for a few minutes before the bell rang.  When Karl walked up to me, I thought it was to clarify our plans for the weekend. 

            “Jan, we need to talk,” Karl said, standing while leaning into me, both of his hands on my desk.

            “What about, honey?”  I asked.  The majority of the class had stopped talking, and was listening to see what Karl had to say next.  The silence was louder than the bell that would be ringing in a few moments.

            “We-“ he stood tall and spoke overly dramatically, “Need to take a break.”

            Someone behind me let out an “Ohhh….”

            The mystery behind the meaning of his words paralyzed me.

            “What—why?”  I asked, leaning back in my chair to create more of a distance between us.

            “I’m sick of you flirting with other guys,” he said.  “I see you do it all the time- with Henry, Kevin, Dan….”

            I wanted to say that I didn’t flirt with other guys.  I wanted to say he had no right to say such a thing, anyways, because he occasionally flirted with other girls.  But the ability in me to express confidence remained paralyzed and inert.  I wanted to crawl under the desk.

            I assumed he accused me of flirting with other guys because he just wanted to break up with me.  Maybe he was bored.  Maybe he didn’t love me anymore.  But I could tell by his tone of voice that he was serious. 

And then the bell rang.  And in that moment Karl and I weren’t an item.  That night I stayed up crying, wondering if Karl had even given it a second thought. 

           

“I didn’t know you liked drawing,” I said, turning the page of my journal.  “Do you like art as much as basketball?” 

            Dan looked up from his sketchbook.  His stare stayed put for a moment towards the ceiling, until it looked like he was, mentally, about to go under in thought. 

            “My Dad doesn’t know I like to draw,” he said.  “I feel like if I told him I like drawing and painting better than basketball he’d probably freak out.  He wants my life to revolve around basketball, so I can get a scholarship to college.”

            I wanted to talk more about it, but his facial expression seemed melancholy, so I didn’t pursue the topic anymore. 

            I’m sitting across from Dan, Karl, and I am trying to keep my cool.

            Notebook Karl was in my lap the whole time.  I hoped that I wouldn’t say something stupid, so that I wouldn’t lose whatever shot I had with one of the only other boys I liked besides Karl at school.  A staff member with an ID dangling around her neck, wearing brown clogs and black yoga pants, motioned for me and Dan to get up off of the floor to join group, so we filed into the room, me in front of him.  Two female staff members led the group.  One had strawberry blonde hair, the other, auburn; they were both short in stature.  Throughout group they encouraged people to participate, but it seemed to me like they were just there to get paid, like they didn’t really care what happened.  My first time in the hospital, the staff was very caring.  One staff member, Bethany, stayed up all night and listened to me while I cried and told her why I was there- my parents had broken up and I had run away from home.  I wished Bethany was there, but she wasn’t.  It was just Brenda and Gina in the community room.

In art group we made picture frames, in poetry I read something I had written last night, when I couldn’t sleep and spent half of the night staring out the window and watching cars pass by the hospital.  Half way into group I had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and when I got back, two chairs lied sideways on the floor, and the center table was on its side.  Dan and Chris were in the center of the room, and Dan had just shoved him, pushing his arms against his chest, so that Chris awkwardly stumbled back, before doing the same. 

            “What’s your problem, man,” Chris exclaimed, his eyes popping.

            “You called my poem stupid,” Dan yelled.  His cheeks were red and his eyes almost cross-eyed with anger.  “I didn’t call your stupid poem stupid.”

            Chris, in an instant, glanced to the side and let out a sarcastic laugh; then he looked Dan up and down in disgust.

            “You just did, idiot.”

The two staff members tried to intervene, but after Chris accidently violently collided with one of them, and the staff member fell to the floor, both receded.  So I immediately ran up to them and stood between the two.  I held both my hands on either of their shoulders.

            “Stop,” I said.  There was so much I could have said, to Dan, about how I had never seen such a side to him, about how he was better than that.  But I just stood silently, until the look of anger started to fade from their faces.

            Chris walked away, shaking his head.

            “Ok, group’s over,” a staff member said. 

            I put my hand on Dan’s back and led him to a table.

            “Can I see your poem?” I asked.

            He took the corner of his composition book and flicked it out in front of him.  “Sure, but…it’s junk.”

            “I won’t think it’s junk, I promise.”

            I opened to the page dated 7-16-17.  The poem read:

            Being alone can be tough,

            Until you find that part of you that you can’t get enough.

            And being with friends can help you out

            Even when you aren’t sure what you are mad about.

            After I read Dan’s poem, I felt like I hardly knew him.  I had always thought of him as the basketball player everyone liked, who never got mad at anyone, who no one ever got mad at.  Dan traced the lines of the table surface with his thumb.  The television was playing in the back of us, the Bulls were on, but we were so far away that we couldn’t see how the game was going.

            “After you left, I was sad,” Dan said.

            “After I left, Karl was happy,” I said.

Dan and I left the table and sat on the thin navy carpet and watched television until the lunch carts were in front of the dining room, across from the community room.

            “Are you still mad at him?” Dan asked.

            “…. Kind of.”

            “No one really gets over their first break up.”

            I thought to myself how ironic Dan’s opinion was.  Most people easily got over their first breakup.  But I felt like he was right.

            “True.”

            I had a lot on my mind at dinner.  Dan sat next to me in the cafeteria, but we didn’t talk.  Would Dan take Karl’s place, once I got back to the real world?  It seemed like an easy answer.  Maybe Dan and I would go out on dates a few times, and we would see where it would go.  Maybe he just wanted to be friends.  What would Karl think about that?

            “Would you like to go see a movie when we get out of here?” I asked Dan.

            Dan bit into his sandwich.  He didn’t answer for such a long time that I was about to repeat myself, until he mumbled,

            “Maybe.”

            His eyes nervously darted around the room. 

            “Not…right away though.  I don’t want to be on Karl’s bad side.  I know you two broke up, but… it might be too soon.”

            The red numbers of the digital clock near the cafeteria door flashed 6:00pm four times.

            “But we could still be friends,” he said.  He scratched the side of his head.

            That night I read Huck Finn in my room.  After a while I got sick of it and watched the cars driving by outside.  Things were so different when I didn’t have the ability to control my own life.  My mom had put me in the hospital after I came home crying and screaming about Karl.  He was my first boyfriend.  I had known him since kindergarten.  The fact that Dan was down the hall comforted me.  After the events of today, I saw Dan as a real person, as opposed to before- someone almost perfect.  I knew eventually we would both get out of the hospital, but things wouldn’t be how they used to be.  Before I fell asleep, I drew a picture of him- his face, his sleepy, smiling eyes.  I slipped it under his door.  Then, I was able to sleep. 

           

           

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.