Alone (In a Mental Hospital)

I think this is the most alone I’ve ever felt in a mental hospital.

This is my penance. Being stuck here, surrounded by people who are all getting increasingly better while I get exponentially worse. Wanting nothing more than to die while trapped in a hospital where they refuse to let me. The agony of being alive, of not being able to self-harm, of being watched like a hawk by staff. This is my penance. This is my hell.

No one understands. I’m stuck like this, sharing this body with people who hate me. Destined to forever remember painful things so close to nightmares that I can hardly tell if they’re real. The lessons. The churches. The cages.

My head is like foam. Please, I don’t want to be stuck like this. I don’t want to remember.

The other patients are getting along. They trade stories from their lives, animated by emotion. I wish I could connect.

I wish I could feel safe in this world again. I’m stuck in a prison of pain and grief, mourning the good, fair world I dreamed of. Why did I EVER think that I could achieve that? That I could find somewhere warm and loving, somewhere that other people don’t even dream of because they already have it? But I can’t blame them. How can you truly be grateful for something you’ve never lost?

The loss of hope for future safety—it’s like a hole in my chest that’s opened and will never close. It’s knowing that this world will kill me. It’s knowing that I will die before I can get better because the weight of living will crush me.

Why do I have to keep fighting? Why do I have to be the one who survives? Why did I make it out? Why didn’t they just kill me?

It’s at moments like these that I think killing myself would be my last act of compliance.