And if he was part of me, if he had always been part of me, then that meant something else too. It meant that I had never been completely alone. Even when it felt like it, even when Iwas.There has always been something in there with me, and I don’t know if that’s comforting or terrifying. Maybe it’s both, but I stopped trying to separate us, because maybe that was never the point.
Maybe the point wasn’t to get rid of him; maybe the point was to understand what part of me needed him in the first place and what that says about what I am. I had too much time alone with my own head in there. The same memories kept returning over and over, each time dragging something new to the surface, until eventually they stopped feeling separate from each other. They started connecting in ways I couldn’t ignore anymore, forming something ugly and undeniable in front of me. Once I saw it clearly, there was no forcing myself blind to it again.
They called it care, that’s the word they used for everything that had happened to me. Care, support. But if that’s what it was, then why did it always comeaftersomething broke? Why was there always a threshold I had to cross first, something I had to become, something I had to do, before anyone stepped in and decided I was worth managing. I thought about that a lot.
Lying in that room, walking those same halls, sitting in those same chairs while people wrote notes about me like I was a case instead of a person. Because it didn’t feel like they were trying to keep people well, it felt more like they were waiting for them to fall apart in a way that could be documented. There’s no reward in something that never breaks, but the second it does, the second someone becomes visible enough and dangerous enough, then everything moves. Then suddenly there are people, resources, systems that come alive around you, not to prevent it from happening again, but to contain what already happened. And I sat there thinking, if their entire structure depends on people like me reaching that point, what exactly are they trying to fix?
Because if everyone stayed whole, if no one cracked, no one spiraled, no one ended up where I did, what would be left for them to do?
The answer wasn’t comforting, and it didn’t stop there, it spread.
The same logic showing up in places that had nothing to do with me directly, but somehow still felt connected. Wars that never ended because ending them meant cutting off the flow of something bigger. Systems that claimed they couldn’t afford to keep people alive properly, while burning through more in a day than most people would ever see in a lifetime, and we’re supposed to believe there’s no other way. I stopped believing that, because the more I looked at it, the more it felt like everything was built to keep itself running, not to fix what itclaimed to exist for. If something actually worked, if it solved the problem completely, it would make itself irrelevant.
Systems don’t survive by making themselves unnecessary.
Banks don’t exist to erase debt, they exist because debt continues. Pharmaceutical companies don’t exist because people get cured, they exist because people keep needing something.
Politics doesn’t exist to solve everything, because if everything was solved, there would be nothing left to promise.
It’s all sustained and maintained. And people like me, we just end up inside it.
I started seeing it everywhere. Not as something that happened tomespecifically, just part of a structure that doesn’t really care who it catches, as long as it keeps catching someone. And the worst part, the part that stuck with me the most, was realizing how easily everyone plays along. A room full of broken people, pointing at each other like they’re different, like one kind of damage is somehow more acceptable than another. Like the way someone falls apart determines whether they’re judged or treated.
I was no different, I sat there too.
And still, nothing of it changed anything, because at the end of it, I was still there, until I wasn’t. They told me I was stabilized. They said it with the kind of confidence people borrow from medical terms, as if a word could erase what had happened inside me. As if I hadn’t simply been reduced into something easier to manage through routine, surveillance, and enough medication to keep the worst parts of me sedated.
They gave me papers with instructions and follow-ups. Things I was supposed to do once I was out, as if stepping outside those walls wouldn’t immediately shift everything again. I stood there after they were done speaking, staring at the open doorway while the reality of it settled over me inch by inch. Something pulled tight in my chest when I finally forced myself to move. Eventhen, it felt unreal, like my mind still hadn’t caught up to the fact that nobody was stopping me from leaving.
Two years.
That’s what it had become once it was written down on paper.
A sentence.
A fixed amount of time people could point to and decide was enough, as if everything that happened inside those years could be contained by numbers and signatures. But it didn’t feel finished. It didn’t feel like anything had been completed, if anything, it felt like something had been paused. Held in place long enough for it to stop moving, stop breaking and now it was being released again. They handed me back to the world like I was something that had been fixed enough to function.
I stepped outside and the air felt wrong, different in a way my body didn’t recognize anymore. It almost felt too open, like there was suddenly too much space around me and nothing holding it together. There were no routines waiting, no one telling me when to wake up, where to go, what to do. And that was the problem. In there, everything had been controlled and limited. I knew exactly what I was capable of inside those walls. I knew the boundaries, I knew where I ended.
Out here, I didn’t.
Out here, there was no one stopping me, no one stepping in before something went too far, just me. And after everything I had seen, after everything I had done, after realizing that the thing I had been blaming all along had been me the entire time, that didn’t feel like freedom. It felt like being handed a loaded gun and told to figure out how not to use it without hurting anyone in the process.
The Vestige
Chapter 51
They still kept their hands on me even after the release papers were signed.
I could feel it in every document they pushed across the table, in every instruction spoken with that polite professional tone meant to make control sound reasonable. I was expected to report back regularly after leaving.
Enough supervision to make sure I didn’t disappear too completely into myself again.
Enough that somebody would always know where I was, what state I was in, whether I was still holding together or starting to come apart in ways they couldn’t contain.
Appointments assigned with a psychiatrist outside the facility and continuing to take my medication. They made that clear without saying it like an order, just framed it as something that would bein my best interest,something that would help memaintain stabilityand I could already hear the unspoken part underneath it.
Stop taking it, and we start asking questions again.
