Lifers

by K.C. Blume

Every time I blink, it stains my eyesight like a spilled inkpot, so I just keep them closed. But even with my eyes shut, I can still see. I see the face of every girl that I’ve ever tried to love, but something inside of me has fallen short. I see every man who has muddied my skin with unwanted touches. Their fingerprints still linger to this day.

The facility is too white. They all are. Of the five residential hospitals I’ve been to, only one has been painted differently. Mint green. That place was a fucking mad house. I have a theory that they paint hospitals white because lighter hues are supposed to emote optimism. It’s the manipulation of one’s emotions. Gaslighting, if you really think about it.

I’ve been here before, not at this facility, but in this state of mind. The headspace of a failed suicide attempt is more bleak than the moments before bringing the razor to your wrist or tying that noose around your neck. All you feel is despair because you know you weren’t supposed to feel anything by now.

I like Elsberry better at night. It’s still bright, but everything is washed in a gray and black hue and seems much more melancholic. Less like they’re trying to shove optimism down my throat and more like I’m floating through some sort of purgatory.

When he’s done, I make my way back to that windowsill. There’s something cathartic about basking in the moonlight that sifts in between barred freedom, something poetic.

Silver light washes over her and makes her appear only that much more gray, that much more dead. I haven’t seen Riley in days, but she looks a lot less intimidating in the daytime. Her eyes are brighter then. Now, they just reflect the blackness waiting for me outside, reminding me very much of roadkill on a desolate highway. Empty and alone.

Riley smiles. That’s one thing you adopt pretty quickly when you’re diagnosed with a chronic condition — dark humor. Maybe she thinks I’m funny. I hope she thinks I’m funny.

Like a crow, we love shiny objects, and there is nothing shinier than a silver lining around the storm cloud that is Elsberry State Psychiatric Institution.

Blair tastes like honey—like sweet honey spoons that you stir into your tea on cold, rainy mornings. She’s subtle and slow, her lips moving against mine with purpose. I feel the loss of her like the sting of a bee. It’s sharp, metastasizing in my chest when we finally part, as if I’m allergic to life without her.

“I don’t think men know how to make love,” Riley says, and I agree. “It’s not in their DNA, never has been. Why do you think women have always had ‘close lady friends’?”

“You’re not crazy, Blair.” She says, “Some of us here are, but not you. You’ve just got more emotions than your beautiful body can handle sometimes.”

She’s looking right through me, like she isn’t sure if I’m real, too. Any glimmer of life that I’d seen our first night of shared cigarettes has now been replaced by fear. That’s how they keep the crazies quiet in places like this. Remove all sense of surety and replace it with mismatched memories, which leaves nothing but a gut-wrenching fear of the unknown that patients can’t escape without the use of brain-numbing medications.

“No, Blair. She’s actually crazy. She doesn’t just push people away and cut up her wrists like you do. I don’t catch her sticking her fingers down her throat like Mira. She’s goddamn delusional, and you’re just another fucking hallucination for her to dance within the halls long after you’re gone.”

I remember what Mira told me on the day we met about blues and reds not mixing to make violet. I've been selfishly planting lilacs all around Riley’s garden with plans of plucking them into a bouquet to take home once I leave, never mind the fact that it will leave her view barren.

If she wants to die, I could help her. I could die with her. I could dance with her in the afterlife for all of eternity if only it meant I didn’t have to feel her loss.

If she is death, I am happy to take her hand and walk into the afterlife.