“Well God damn it, you have me. Why would I be sitting here right now if I didn't care deeply about you? You have Toby. There are other people who love you and want to help. Don't be difficult. Just get through this. You know you're stronger than this. Stop being-”
“You don’t understand. You don't know how much it hurts. Physically. How much it aches and burns. You don't realize what it’s like to be taking all of these pills. All I see here is white. Everywhere. Every time I open my eyes. Everywhere I go. Nothing has meaning or depth or light. Everything is empty. Even the faces here are blank. You don't know how hard it is to push myself to stay in reality.”
"You haven't been living in reality for the past five years of your life, Jack! If you could somehow push yourself through that, you can get through this place. Your problem is that you always want to act tough, but it’s not what you need right now. You're just making yourself out to be a stubborn sunofabitch."
“No, don’t fucking say that, Anna. You don't know what this is like. People don't like suicidal maniacs, even if they've gone through ‘recovery’. I don’t have a job, I don’t have a home. My family won’t even fucking talk to me. I swear to God…
“Well, you have no other options. If you keep doing this to yourself, you'll likely die. Do you really want that? That’s not the person I’ve called my best friend for the last fifteen years.”
“Why should I push through this if there's nothing on the other side? What good am I, dead or alive?”
“You matter to me. That's what I'm telling you. Arguments or no, I've fucking been there for you. For as long as I've known you, I've been there. And up until five years ago, you had always been there for me. I intend to keep doing this until the end.”
“Yeah, whatever. Why are you really here? What is this going to do? Give me hope that I'll push through all of this? I don't want to fucking be here.”
To this day, he was convinced that she had no idea. So he had made compromises. For years, they were best friends. She was under the impression that this was still the case. Jack didn't admit it to himself, but Anna was still the most important person in his life. It was just so hard to think about her. So many memories of his former self appeared when he remembered Anna’s long brown hair, her bold blue eyes, or the sharpness of her gracefully contoured jaw. When he remembered her, he remembered all of his friends. All of the times they had laughed together. All of the times he had smiled at her. He missed the laughter and the shouting and all their snide, sarcastic remarks. Nowadays, when he spoke to her, he was never really there. Long ago, Jack had decided that he couldn't be – that it would hurt too much otherwise.
Jack watched his eyes moisten in his reflection on the floor. That day, he was forced to be there when they spoke. The moment he looked into Anna’s eyes and recognized her compassion, he had almost lost the ability to keep up his guard. It was a miracle that he hadn’t broken down and cried in front of her. He didn’t dare tell her all he felt in those moments, but she knew. Everything else was blank and lifeless, and his passions were thus magnified against the bleakness of their situation. Before she trotted away in her pressed business suit and spiky shoes, he remembered the day that he and Anna had skipped school together and spent the afternoon in the empty wilderness of
It was all the way back in the fall of their Sophomore year of high school. They found a valley in the middle of a dense forest and laid there for hours, lazily staring up at the sky and laughing with one another, letting the greens and browns and blues completely absorb their flesh, chasing each other through the poplar trees and singing…
“Fuck.”
“What's wrong?”
“I don't know if I can keep doing this. It's killing me.” Jack’s eyes wandered across the linoleum-tiled floor until they rested on a dusty corner of the room.
“You can get over it.”
“It's broken. All of it.”
“What is?”
“My life. I can't fix this. Everywhere I go, this’ll follow me. …It’s God damn freezing in this place.”
“Don't say that. Please don't say that. You can get through this,” said Anna, leaning closer to Jack and struggling to make eye contact with the disfigured shell of her friend. Without detracting his gaze from his corner, Jack could feel her hovering over his pale face. He felt the cool breeze of her breath and the delicate essence of cherry blossoms at her neck. Hypnotized by the memory of better years, Jack looked up for a moment to meet Anna’s ocean-blue eyes. Immediately, he recognized a now-unfamiliar look of genuine compassion. Anger boiled up from his soul and colored his face a vibrant pink. She spoke again, “I can help you as soon as you get back on your feet. You'll never be without-”
“There’s just no way out. I’m going right back to the bruises and the scars as soon as I get out of here. I know it, because that’s how this happened. I don’t have anything left to enjoy.”
“You can stay with me and Toby. You still have friends. We love you and we’re just waiting for a chance to help you.” Anna tilted her head in the way Jack’s therapist always did when she attempted to fool him into “opening his heart chakra”. When he saw someone tilt their head in that manner, he almost never opened up. For Jack, there was nothing more insincere and alienating than that simple tilt of the chin.
“No, that's not how it is. You know it isn't. The friends I had before this stopped hanging out with me the minute I started doing all this bullshit, and I'm not-”
Nothing had a taste or a smell. The doctors told Jack that he had ruined a large portion of his sensory capabilities in the accident. He thought they were full of shit. They wanted everything to be fucking neutral, no tastes or sounds or enjoyment or pleasure. Not here. Here, you waited. You waited for comfort and love and light. And sometimes, you waited for darkness.
Once Anna left, Jack dragged his pale, meek body into the bathroom. He gazed at his reflection in the metal sheet that functioned as a mirror. Open wounds and bruises engulfed his flesh. His skin was yellowed and fell from his bones. His eyes were blackened and hung from folds of skin attached to his skull. His perception of his semblance was, like so many other things in his life, indecipherable.
Some days, he was proud of it; some days, he looked into that obscured mirror and smiled, laughed with his reflection. To him, these were reminders of who he was and where he had been – they were battle scars. He had waged a war against the universe.
Anna stood, flattened her blouse and turned to leave. In an instant, Jack’s hard metal door slammed behind her and he was alone again. With a fixed composure, she walked the length of the hall without wincing even once. Jack stood to watch her slip from his grasp once more. She’ll be in tears before she starts the car. He knew it.
It was cold in that place. Most of the time, Jack curled up in his thin, stale bed and shivered, closing his eyes to block out all of the white. White sheets, white walls, white floors, white lights. No windows. Here, everything was dull and baseless.
“And there’s just about nothing you can do to stop me. I care about you more than most people I know.”
“Mm. Yeah, that's nice. It’s just that guilt won't see me through this. I’m sorry.”
“You're going to get through this.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re going to do it, and you’re going to do it for me.”
“I’d rather die.” Unable to allow himself to sympathize with Anna, Jack shouted back at her with more passion than he had let on.
“You don’t mean that.” Anna slowly tilted her chin and attempted a softer tone with Jack once more.
“I do. You can hate me for it if you want, but death is better than this. I’d rather have sheer darkness than these blank white walls.”
“Fuck you.”
“Two minutes, guys. Let's wrap it up.” The guard tapped on Jack’s door and peered in on the pair for a moment. His voice had retained its unsubstantiated tone of authority through the muffling effect of the thick glass window to Jack’s room.
Anna glared at the guard. After a brief, discomforting moment, she returned her gaze to meet Jack’s tired brown eyes. “I'm going to call you every day, and you're going to tell me how much it fucking hurts. How cold it is. How alone you are. If you don’t pick up, I’m coming here myself. If you refuse to see me, I’ll wait here until you get your shit together.”
“Jesus. Good luck.”
“Same to you. Get some sleep tonight, you need it.”
“You do the same. Don't stay up all night with Toby, like I know you kids do.”
“This is why you're going to get through this. My best friend shouldn't be this much of a prick.”
On other days, which occurred more frequently, it was simply what he had become. That horrible reflection was who he was, and none of it made any difference. In his mind, no one who he cared to justify would scrutinize his behavior, and it was all a matter of time until his existence came to a close.
On those days, he forgot about Anna. He forgot about how madly he had loved her so many years ago. How she had completely overlooked that fact on so many occasions.
horribly out-of-tune melodies. On that day, it was hard for them to go their separate ways, even once the horizon began to engulf the sun and fear crept over the dusty woodlands.
The sheer vividness of the memory forced the moistness in Jack’s eyes to condense and form eager little droplets of pain. He hated the hall monitors. He hated the time constraints. He wanted time to stay with Anna for hours and tell her everything. He wanted to share his memories and his feelings at a time when it was hard to feel. He wanted to play hide-and-seek in the
He remembered how this had happened as the tiny droplets in his eyes broke from his skin and fell silently onto the icy rotting sink.
Everyone was in limbo. Jack came to understand that this was intentional. They wanted all of their patients to experience birth once more. They wanted nothing to influence their state of being until somehow, miraculously, they pulled through – or otherwise walked away to pick up where they left off. The latter was more likely the case.
In this setting, troubled little Jack learned to make friends quickly, and as soon as age allowed, he spent most of his nights away at friends' houses, dreading his return to his miserable and confusing life.
Jack’s gaze grew foreign and distant in his distorted, metallic reflection. He removed his shirt and ran his eyes over his flesh like a doctor over a morgue-bound patient’s body; never acknowledging the disturbing nature of his appearance; never acknowledging his identity as a human. Jack ran his cold, bony fingers over the swollen, gaping scars on his arms. Today, these were battle scars. Today, he chose to remember who he was.
He wanted her to hold him and tell him he would be okay as he wept on her shoulders. But this was prevented by all the fucking nurses and guards and doctors swarming about in the halls – more reminders of the horrible nature of his character. More reminders of how deeply he had proven himself a fuck-up.
Every day of his life, he blamed his parents for his failures. He accepted his shortcomings as such, but they were never his burden. For this, his family resented him. But it was true that they were never loving or supporting of him.
His mother was schizophrenic. All of his early memories of home involved his mother and her screams. Sometimes, knives were involved. At other times, demons were imagined. Back then, no one helped. Nothing made it better. His father didn't care – or at least Jack thought that he didn’t care, on account of the fact that he was always gone. On most days, Jack was left with his mother, scared and sad. When his father came home, Jack would shut himself off in his room and refuse to speak to his dad. And aside from her frantic screams, his mother never really spoke to him.
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