My first day I followed a man who called himself The Stripe. He had been there at the hospital with me, helping me walk. He was the only person I knew, even a little bit. I stayed close to his side as he introduced me to those in my ward. They smiled politely. I felt sick to my stomach. An old childhood shyness had crept back into my personality to blinding extremes, I just didn't want to talk to or be introduced to anybody. The only thing that consoled me, as The Stripe helped me put the sheets on my new bed, was that I could smoke as many cigarettes as I wanted to all day and all night long.
I inhaled cigarette after cigarette after cigarette until I felt ill, sitting on my bed staring at the wall across from me. Someone popped their head in to check on us every five-ten minutes or so, and I found it distracting, even though I couldn't figure out what it was distracting me from. Mike, the roommate, didn't say anything for a long while, but, finally, he burst out with it:
"Can you PLEASE go somewhere else if you're going to smoke three packs of cigarettes?"
I looked at him for a while. I didn't know where he expected me to go. I thought we were confined to our rooms, or something. I got up and stood in the doorway for a while, debating whether or not to leave or not. Sucking down the nicotine.
"I didn't mean to stand on the other side of the room, you know. What's the matter with you, anyway? You don't talk? Fine. I'll open the window."
There were bars on the windows.
I left.
People were milling around the halls. I walked quietly and cautiously, hoping that I could remain as invisible as possible. There was an open room with a television and most everyone was in there. I stood in the doorway, and when someone looked up at me and invited me to sit down I turned away, walking back down the hallway, staring at the floor in front of my feet. I peeked in the rooms. Most of them were empty, beds all made, waiting for their tenants. I took a left turn into the bathroom, finding it empty, and I sat down on the floor, inhaling the last few drags of my cigarette before throwing it in the toilet.
The bathroom resembled any other public bathroom facility, except for the fact that none of the toilet stalls had any doors. In the next room there was a locker room with an adjoining shower room - and there was no privacy there either. There were ten shower heads in between each there was a waist-high divider. I suppose this was to give the illusion of privacy, but I was not fooled. I smoked my cigarettes sitting on the last toilet in the last stall, as far out of the view of the monitor as possible. To smoke and piss were the only reasons I entered the bathroom for the first week.
On my return to my room, a nurse approached me. She demanded I point her to my supervisor, but I had no such person with me.
"It's almost lights out. You need to get to your bed."
Lights out? I was bewildered as she pushed me back toward my room. All I had wanted was a cigarette and some alone time.
I sat on my bed and I stared at my pajamas for a long time, folded neatly beside me. I looked at my roommate, who was already in bed, reading a book. When our light went out, I crawled into bed in my clothes. It was eleven o'clock. It was the first time I had noticed the time in weeks. When I was resigned to my bed, all I did was sleep or stare at the ceiling. Night and day seemed pretty much the same. I didn't care much. I could stare at the ceiling in the dark, but now that my days were more eventful, I really wished I could sleep. And I couldn't. I stared at the ceiling until morning.
I was scared those first few weeks. I curled up inside of myself and wished I hadn't shaved off my hair. I did what I had to do, but when I could avoid sitting in the lounge for dinner, I sat outside on the patio smoking cigarettes as The Stripe talked to me about myself. They forced me to finish all of my meals. I was not allowed to leave until I ate every single last bite. In my free time, I went to my room to stare at the wall, or to the bathroom to stare at the tile. At group therapy, I stared at the floor.
Showering was my least favorite part of the day. When I was in the hospital, nurses washed me with sponges, and assisted me in every visit to the restroom. For some reason, that type of humiliation was preferable to the day I had to stand in a shower room in front of several other guys. I sat in the locker room with The Stripe for two hours, three nights in a row, absolutely refusing to bathe in such a public situation.
"I'll stand with you." He assured. I just shook my head. I cried and cried as all of the other guys got dressed around me. I covered my eyes. No amount of dragging and reassurance could get me in there until I was so unbearably dirty that I just succumbed. I was terrified and faced the wall, ashamed of my skeletal body.
Every day, before my activities began, I spent an hour alone with The Stripe. Since I didn't speak, usually we just sat together, my palms on my knees, my eyes fixating on the space directly in front of my toes. He spoke to me, gently coercing me into conversation, even if it just came in the form of a head nod or a hand gesture. We had developed a kind of sign language, but sometimes I just ignored him. My head was pretty empty, but sometimes it seemed like there were more interesting things going on than the matter at hand.
"So, I heard you're doing well in physical therapy." He'd say. "You're strong, so says your trainer."
I stared at the empty book shelf and nodded thoughtfully, though I wasn't really paying much attention. In an hour, I would have to eat breakfast, and I was not looking forward to it. I was sore from physical therapy. It made me feel rather pathetic. I was able to walk, but my muscles were still poor. It took a great amount of effort to lift a lunch tray or put on my clothes. I was tired and sweaty from one lap around the ward. Much of what we did was menial, light weight exercise. I left exhausted and shaking. I didn't understand how I was strong. The Stripe knew. He had spent three weeks carrying me down the hall of a hospital and teaching me to walk. He never expected anything of me, then. He carried me even when he knew I was just being lazy. I didn't like the commentary.
"Did you sleep okay last night?" He asked, choosing a different attack. "Were there any nightmares?" Two questions with two different answers. I just shook my head 'No' as a response. No. No nightmares. I sort of slept. Maybe that one is a 'no' too, then. My head was too empty for nightmares, anyway. I tuned him out by watching the clock tick for the rest of the hour.
There was art therapy. They said I could do music, I chose to paint instead. I hadn't painted in years. I hated everything that I did. My faulty technique, the ugly colors, the lack of linearity in virtually everything I tried to paint. I never threw them away or started over, I just painted, and the picture got uglier and uglier as I went. They made me sick with their ugliness, and at the end I always wanted to tear them up. Usually, though, they were stored in a little portfolio with my name on it. Taylor Hanson. I didn't recognize it.
At first, nobody knew who I was. Or, if they did, I was never told. I was pretty much unrecognizable, anyway. My hair was gone, my face was sallow, and I didn't utter a sound. Maybe, truly, nobody connected the name with the face. I had hoped so. But I found out the hard way that they all knew. That the whole world knew. I was standing in the lounge, watching the news when my face came on the television. I went to throw something, but The Stripe grabbed me quickly. I screamed loudly to block out the voice on the TV that said it all. Everyone stared. I was pulled out of the room. My throat tingled.
Mike, my roommate said, "You're the 'MmmBop' kid?" And I turned over, covering my ears with my hands.
It was unfair. My shame was to be my own. That's how I wanted it. But now everyone knew, and it wasn't fair. At lunch, a boy named Angel sat next to me. He was the first person, aside from Mike, who had tried to talk to me at all. He didn't ask me something stupid, he just spoke.
"I know what it's like." He said, but he never assumed. "Want to go have a smoke?"
Angel had been molested for several years by an old teacher of his. He then became rebellious, got into a lot of trouble, and eventually landed himself in juvie, where he was gang banged goodbye on his last day. He tried to kill himself several times. That's how he ended up here. I didn't know any of this at the time. I only knew that he was small, smaller than I, and that he had been in the ward for several months already. He became my first friend. It was with Angel that I smiled or cried.
The Stripe began asking questions. Asking and asking and asking until I answered. He didn't take it if I ignored him, anymore. He wanted me to speak to him, to open up my mouth and my mind to the world again. I preferred where I was, in my silence. In my oblivion. In my thoughtlessness.
"Do you write at all?" He asked. I thought about it. I used to keep a journal every day, but then one day it stopped, when words no longer could sum up the hugeness of what I felt, or the littleness of how I felt. There were no words for the emotions that never pulsed through me. There were no words for emptiness. I had been in the ward for a few weeks already, and I was still confused as to what exactly about me was so outstandingly bad. I was the most docile creature in the ward.
"Taylor?" I must have been staring off into space for too long. I shook my head, 'No.' Most of his days were spent making sure I wasn't dead or completely vegetative.
"Do you have any releases, Taylor? Any at all? Do you ever want to express how you feel?"
I don't feel. That's the point. I shook my head 'No' and shrugged. My head was empty, my days were dull. I smoked cigarettes, ate food, and stayed up all night, staring at a blank ceiling. I felt so searingly boring. What was there to say? What was there to express? The only feeling I had recalled feeling at all for several weeks was fear. And it was a fear I couldn't even pinpoint well enough to put into words.
"Here..." He said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a notebook. "I got this for you yesterday on my way home. I want you to keep a journal. I want you to write in it every night. And tomorrow, bring it to me. You don't have to let me read it, you just have to show me that you've done it, okay?"
I nodded and accepted the notebook, my fingers clinging to its leather binding.
That night I wrote. It took a long time, but I did it. Two words. "Locked up." I didn't know what it was supposed to mean, but it was all I could muster. Words had never come so hard for me before, especially not on paper. I was embarrassed the next day when I couldn't even show him a paragraph, or formulate the text to express my inability to communicate. I tried to say I was sorry but all that came out was this painful noise and I began to cry.
"It's okay, Taylor." He said, leading me by the shoulder to sit down. "This is good. Just keep writing. Even if it's just a word a day."
I began to realize, as the weeks progressed, how much I had forgotten.