Suite 815 smells aggressively of hydrangeas, which makes me miss my mother and long instead for the typical sterile smell of hospitals that I am used to. I whisper my name to the woman behind the desk, and she whispers something back about date of birth and take a seat and with you in one minute. I take the photo-sized piece of paper she hands me and don’t hear what I am supposed to do with it, so I use it as a bookmark instead. As I sit, I realize the way I gave my birthday under my breath, as if whispering could unbirth me; I recognize the way I didn’t spell out my name like I usually do, as if by muting my identity I could pretend I had never been in the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital.

         Patients are taken back one at a time in a manner unlike anything I’ve seen in primary care offices or emergency rooms. Instead of calling a name, the doctor walks gently up to the patient, shoulders rounded, knees bent, crouched, as if approaching a feral dog. The timidity of the doctors makes me want to scream, to splinter the silence that I suspect is a cover-up for insanity. So quiet. Except for the faint whir of the heat cranked so high it has me sweating in my long-sleeved shirt. I forgot my headphones, so I try to lose myself inside my book. In the silence, I can hear my own thoughts striking against my skull.

         A woman with frizzy, blonde hair and a bow on her blouse calls my name. She tells me hers, which I immediately forget—something like Lauren or Jessica—and brings me down a series of hallways which is so twisted that I can only assume it serves as a maze to trap the ones who try to bolt. I note the turns we take, just in case. In the office, there is another woman who tells me her name—something like Megan or Sarah.

         The intense invincibility of weeks ago has rotted in the pit of my stomach and infested all my organs with lethargy and desperation, and my tongue can’t find the words or the ears to clear them out. I live my life in bold print. Every low is rock bottom, every high a zenith, and, somehow, each new rock bottom plunges me deeper than the last, and every new zenith has a more progressive means of electrifying my consciousness.

         I get through the obligatory questions alright; I am used to them and have established answers that tell the truth in the shortest window of time. I feel safe in all of my relationships. I do not want to hurt myself or anyone else—that one is only half true. They ask me how I’ve been, and, unable to articulate anything specific, the words “not great” trip their way over my tongue. When I see them typed in Times New Roman on Megan-Sarah’s screen, I realize the massive understatement that my tendency towards quiet always instigates—not great? Try miserable or broken or hopeless.  Everything that is bold in my head comes out of my mouth in 5 point font.

         Lauren-Jessica asks what brings me in, as if I am in this splintered wooden chair by choice and not as a condition of my release from the emergency room. As if she doesn’t have the evidence of my seven little stitches printed and held in the manila folder on her lap.   

         I see myself, suddenly, as if from the outside. I hate this girl, how she uses feeble blue threads to hold herself together, how she hides the proof of her unraveling under layers of fabric and secrecy. Throat dry, my wounds have spoken for me until now—my standard answers to put others at ease are no longer satisfying or even plausible. Now, faint admissions of suicidal thoughts slip past my teeth before I have finished admitting them to myself. Hearing these words from my own lips is intoxicating—like I am someone else. The real me is ricocheting around my own head, slamming against the thoughts I just confessed. They say something about partial hospitalization and verify my phone number and let me walk out of the office as if the conversation we just had was something I divulged on a daily basis, not something I had only just now discovered.

         In the elevator, there is no more mumbling or whispering. Just silence. I am not a feral dog; I am docile and beaten quiet. No more hushed pursuits of understanding or acceptance or help. I zip up my coat and wander out onto the wet concrete, lips stitched tight as my skin. The noise has resumed around me, and the obligatory silence settles back into my bones.

         I imagine living in a psychiatric waiting room for the rest of my life, falling in and out of emergency rooms in the middle of the night, tripping on my own tongue trying to articulate that I don’t want to lose the ways I thrive even if it means dealing with the ways I drown. My lungs wrinkle at the thought of doctors calling me sick forever.

         When I started medication, Dr. Putnam told me that I was most likely going to have to take it for the rest of my life. She said that bipolar disorder is a degenerative disease, that things would only get worse. I didn’t believe her until the nurse in the ER had to check my bra and underwear for razor blades, until I stared out of the corner of my eyes watching myself get sewn up like a tear in my leggings. My mom used to practice sutures on bananas.

         I try to pretend that self-harm is my only symptom, that if I can forget the color of the inside of my flesh or the way a lot of blood smells like rusted pennies, then I will be okay. As if my body doesn’t turn to bone when I get depressed, as if my journals will fill themselves with art without hypomania. The truth is that Lauren-Jessica and Megan-Sarah and Drs. Putnam, Rosales, Awasthi, Simpson, Epino can all look at a list of symptoms, check them off one by one, define me in terms of hospital procedures and milligrams.

         I will go off my meds in an impulsive haze, crawl back to them when I forget why I’m still breathing and wish that I weren’t. I will admit myself to a partial hospitalization program even though it makes me feel brainless and fragile. I will drop in on support groups twice a month, and to therapy weekly, and use an app to track my mood every 4 hours. I will hate some of it more than others, and I will wish that my peaks weren’t so out of reach, weren’t so dependent on my basements. I will fucking hate it.

         And I will do it anyway. Because of hydrangeas and my mom, watching football with my dad, the way my sister tells stories in a spiral instead of a straight line. Bamboo plants and rocks in jars, falling asleep in my boyfriend’s lap, crying at Harry Potter and breathing out underwater. Because sometimes I think it will be worth it.

         And sometimes is all I need to stay alive.

– Amelia Wright