"You're doing great," one of them tells me.
I'm not doing great.
I'm dying.
I'm falling apart.
I'm being unmade, piece by piece, and I don't know if there will be anything left when it's over.
Between bouts of vomiting, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
The tiles are off-white, dotted with tiny holes in a pattern that my fevered brain tries to make sense of.
I count them. Lose count. Start over.
Anything to keep my mind occupied.
Anything to keep from thinking about how easy it would be to walk out the door.
No one's stopping me.
I signed myself in voluntarily.
I could sign myself out just as easily.
I could be back in Morgantown by tomorrow, back in a trap house by nightfall, back to the blissful oblivion that's the only thing that makes any of this bearable.
The thought is so tempting it makes me shake even harder.
But then I think about Garrett's face when he dropped me off.
The tears he tried to hide.
The way his voice broke when he said "Come back to me."
I can't do that to him again.
I can't be the reason his heart breaks one more time.
So I stay. I suffer.
I count the holes in the ceiling tiles and wait for the next wave of misery to hit.
The third day brings the hallucinations.
I know they're not real.
Some distant, still-functioning part of my brain understands that what I'm seeing is just my neurons misfiring, my body's desperate attempt to make sense of the chaos it's experiencing.
But knowing doesn't make them any less terrifying.
It starts with shadows.
Shapes moving in the corners of my vision, disappearing when I try to look at them directly.
Then the shadows start to take form, becoming figures that watch me from the edges of the room.
Their faces are blank, featureless, but I can feel their judgment radiating toward me like heat from a fire.
