I have moments when I talk to myself.
It’s like I split myself in half and have conversations with myself on the weather, the ins and outs of Oak Hill, the patients in Oak Hill…
Over the passing months, I’ve somehow learned to become my own best friend.
I’ve somehow learned through time and struggle that at the end of it all, sometimes the only person you can rely on is yourself.
I lie back on my cot and stare at the ceiling. My eyes shift and center on the window. Slices of sunlight cut through the glass and dance along the edges of metal at the end of my cot. There’s no clock in my cell, but I can tell by the way the sun is shining that it’s almost noon and almost time for my afternoon meds.
I’ll take them like a good girl.
I’ll choke them down with a Dixie cup full of water.
I’ll let them dissolve in the pit of stomach and let them work their way through my nervous system, dulling me and numbing me like they’re supposed to.
I’m thinking that maybe I need to change my course of action. I’m thinking that maybe if I become the good little psycho that they want me to be that maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to find the answers that I’m looking for.
I need to be cunning, smart, and obedient.
It’s the only way.
It’s the only way.
It’s the only way I’ll be able to glue together all the pieces of my fractured past. And deep, down inside, I know the only way I’m going to find those pieces and put them together is if I retrieve them myself.
Chapter Nine
~Before~
The human heart is fragile.
So delicate that it should be protected, taken care of.
Nurtured and swaddled among piles of blankets like an infant.
Because once it breaks…
It’s broken forever.
After your heart breaks once, it never heals quite right.
There are always cracks, or chipped pieces. And depending on what kind of person you are and what kind personal strength you have, sometimes after your heart breaks it can feel like you’ve never had a heart at all.
Or t
hat it’s hardened.
Turned to stone.
Then…
You change.
Become a different person.
You become bitter. Cold. Distant. You start to hate things. And people. Pretty much everything around you. You hate the sun for rising every day. You hate the moon for illuminating the night sky. Hate, hate, hate. It consumes you. It eats you alive from the inside out.
Until…