Rehashing old memories...

I didn’t wake up that morning planning to kill myself. It was the last day of the semester. My first semester. I took my finals. Tried calling him over and over cause I didn’t want him to miss them. We had psychology together. We had been separated for a month or so. He was staying with friends of his. After the test, I went home. Later that afternoon, I called his friend’s house to tell him about the final. One answered, said she was talking to her boyfriend and I wasn’t “important enough to talk to him.” That phrase rang in my head for the rest of the night. I only remember bits and pieces, little fragments of time that slip through my fingers the harder I try to remember them. I remember being locked in the bathroom with the phone, laying out each pill, avoiding the ones for my dog, cause I didn’t want him to stay sick. I remember taking the razor blade to my wrist. I don’t remember telling him I was doing it. I don’t remember being off the phone with him long enough for him to call 911. And yet, there they were. EMTs busting through my bathroom door; wrapping my wrists in gauze. I remember throwing up in the ambulance, after they forced something down my throat. The ride seemed to take forever.

I remember my room in the ER, the police officer who couldn’t leave my side, telling me about working for the suicide help line. Talking about God. I remember saying I lost my faith in anything, in anyone.

They took the draw strings from my pants, from my hoodie. Strip searched me. It was late. I eat a TV dinner that I think belonged to one of the nurses. I couldn’t taste anything past the dead in my mouth.

I woke up fuzzy the next day. They told me they had to restart my heart. I don’t remember everything I took, only that Tylenol extra strength was involved, and a lot more. 30 something pills? So they started ‘curing’ me with more pills.

At therapy we talk about my mother. My abused history. We talk about some of the things HE did, but the doctor never asks too many questions, never seems too interested. Says it’s my fault my mother still hurts me because I keep coming back to her.

At group, everyone seems… sad. There’s the girl a year or so younger than me who cuts. There’s the lady who could be an overweight version of my mother, who stabbed herself 16 times, took a bottle of something, chased it with a bottle of something. Her kids found her. The anorexics, schizophrenics, and unnamed whatevers. And ya, us behavioral kinda stick together, taking (only outside of group) about the what, they where… Comparing scars. More therapy happens outside of therapy than in. We take the meds, trash talk the nurses, nick name each other. Brazil nut (mom), peanut (younger me), and walnut (me, cause Brazil says I’m a wall flower, which is true). We answer the phones like that. “You’ve called the nut house, which nut would you like to talk to?”

It’s nearly Christmas, and like so many things, we aren’t allowed to have a tree or real decorations. But the nurses give us construction paper and supervise while we use safety scissors to cut out a tree and decorations. They hand us pieces of tape to put it on wall…