I woke up in a cold room with a plastic mattress and a stranger breathing softly in the bed across from mine. Two huge windows looked out onto a parking lot I didn’t recognize. For a moment I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there. Then I stepped into the hallway and saw the line of people waiting for breakfast, loud and unbothered, as if this was just another Tuesday.
No one told me where to go, so I joined them. The nurses’ station glowed behind glass. A small day room held a few tables, a few chairs, and the kind of silence that isn’t really silence at all. When they marched us single file into the cafeteria, I took a tray and sat alone in the back corner. The food looked like something scraped off a school lunch tray from 1987. I didn’t eat. I watched.
Some people laughed and shouted at the staff. Some shoveled food into their mouths like they hadn’t eaten in days. Some talked to themselves, full conversations with invisible companions. I kept thinking: What the hell happened to me? How did I end up here?
When the staff yelled that we had five minutes left, the room erupted into a kind of chaotic compliance—complaints, insults, and then, somehow, everyone lining up anyway. An older man swung his walker in the air, furious at the world. A woman at the next table kept laughing at jokes only she could hear. A few people in wheelchairs rammed into each other as they crowded the door. Their conversations were wild, looping, untethered from anything I recognized as reality.
That’s when it hit me: Some of these people are actually gone. Not just struggling. Gone.
Back behind the locked doors, I found a seat in the corner of the day room and watched the morning medication line form. People fought over their place like it was a Black Friday sale. I didn’t understand the urgency. Maybe I didn’t want to. A woman skipped down the hall singing. Someone else screamed into a phone. Others colored quietly or complained about the staff. I felt a flicker of empathy, then fear. Was I really like that?
My roommate found me and introduced herself. She said she’d help me “learn the ropes,” which terrified me more than anything else that morning. She brought me to her group—Frankie, who hated everything; Dale, who flirted with anything that moved; and Carol, who used the word fuck like punctuation. They asked where I lived, what I did, how long I’d be there, who to avoid. The questions came fast, like they were trying to place me on some invisible map of the ward.
The noise got too loud. The room too small. I retreated to my bed and remembered the journals I’d been carrying around—pages of unstable thoughts, suicidal scribbles, the kind of writing that would get me locked up for longer if anyone read it. Panic crawled up my spine. I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t like them. I was just exhausted. Overwhelmed. My life had spun out, but I wasn’t… crazy. Right?
By lunchtime, I wasn’t so sure.
My roommate introduced me to more people. More stories. More chaos. I stood in line for another meal I didn’t want, wearing the scrubs they’d given me, wondering where my real clothes were. Wondering where I was.
Looking back now, I can admit it: I wasn’t as different from them as I wanted to believe. My brain had short‑circuited too. I was just better at hiding it. Maybe that’s the only real difference any of us had.
Still hiding behind my mask,
K.
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I'm Still Here. Somehow... 