When I sat down, the mattress made a faint plastic sound.
The window opened only a few centimeters, enough for air, not enough for exit. It felt like even architecture could carry an opinion about you.
There were other children there.
You could always tell the newcomers by how long they watched the doors, or the way they studied the staff as if some hidden meaning might suddenly reveal itself. The ones who had been there longer moved differently. Slower, almost economical, as though expectation itself had become too expensive.
Dinner was at six.
We sat under a clock that filled the room with its ticking. A boy across from me rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, as if he were keeping time with something only he heard.
A girl beside him scratched at her wrist until a nurse said her name twice and she stopped, though only for a moment. No one made eye contact. That requires a kind of trust, and trust was scarce there.
That night, they checked on me every fifteen minutes.
The door would open a few centimeters, a flashlight passed over my bed, a pause, then darkness again. Over and over.
After a while, you begin listening for the door before sleep can take hold. You learn quickly that sleep is partly performance in places like that.
Sleep too deeply, and they worry. Don’t sleep, and they medicate. Even rest came with rules.
I remember lying there thinking I had been moved into a place full of children considered dangerous, and yet what I felt most was not danger but exhaustion.
A whole ward of children too wounded to be left unobserved.
Think about that for a second. What kind of world needs such a room?
On the third day, a psychiatrist asked me why I hurt myself.
He wore a blazer over a sweater and carried a pen that clicked every time I paused. I can still hear that sound. It began to feel like part of the questioning.“Were you trying to die?”No.
“Were you trying to get attention?”No.
“Then what were you trying to accomplish?”Accomplish…
I remember hating that word. As if pain were a project with an objective.
I stared at the floor tiles and tried to find language big enough for something no one had ever helped me name.
Finally, I said,“I wanted to feel… inside.”
That made him stop clicking the pen.
“What does that mean?”
And I wanted to tell him that sometimes people could look straight at me and still fail to register I was there. That pain made me feel solid. That blood made me certain I wasn’t imaginary. But how do you say such things at ten years old to a man with a file open in his lap.
So I just shrugged; he wrote something down anyway.
They gave me medication after that. A small white tablet, no name offered, only water in a paper cup.
“Helps regulate mood.”
I remember almost laughing.
My mood had never been the problem.
Grief is not a mood. Emptiness is not a mood. A child trying not to vanish is not a mood disorder. But pills are neater than listening.
