If I Were to Lie in Limbo

Staring, staring as the ash burns lower and lower to the knuckles, and then I smell the burning cigarette filter; a concluding, half-conscious drag. I lift the corner of the bed and grind my remains beneath the bedpost. I don't want to be out in the main lobby this early in the morning. I'm the only patient awake and there's only one person out there, keeping watch and judging me. I've had to use the bathroom in the small hours of the night once, my toes cold against the tile as I rushed across it. I had felt the stare. It pinned me down—a girl, naked on the table—and his scalpel-glare cut into me through the bathroom walls. It had despised me for being a smoker, being awake, being here, for being the reason that he sat through the night at a desk in the dark; I've never gone out at night after that.

I want other patients to be walking around, the ones who actually become lost in their thoughts, their realities until you can see right through their frames. Those are the ones you don't have to worry about. They consume the stares of anybody around to take the judgment, but that doesn't matter to them. Their world is in their heads.

Streams of sunlight are just now reaching the tips of my toes, making them glow and warming them as the rising sun peaks over the horizon at me. It's a good feeling, but my window only enables this for a brief minute before the rays angle downwards once again.

It's been seasons since I've last seen him. They don't allow him to visit me in the ward and I had only agreed to stay, confined away, until he had a plan to get me out. But the letter had arrived just a few days prior. He would be here today and we would leave this place. I hope that everyone looks up as we walk out. I will walk with him defiantly and they will wish they were me. They'll see him smile with genuine happiness, the way his blond hair curls atop his head, and his perfect composure and confidence. He will control the room, and they will see that he's smiling for me.

The nurse is making her rounds and her heels clack across the tile in the hallway. The sound dies away as she enters each room to deliver the medications. In the past month, I've learned how to cradle the pills under my tongue, to pocket them at the very back as I drink the water that she places in front of me. The clack of her heels swells and alerts me and she's nearly at my door as I try to seem asleep. She nudges me until I sit up and she directs me to take the pills. She watches me with suspicion; she remembers what I was like when I got here. I had put the pills through a hole in my mattress. She discovered it and they changed my room. To her, I am merely a stubborn mouth that she must force pills down. But they rest beneath my tongue as she talks with me and I persist under her gazing eyes—two skeptics that can only disbelieve me. She scans the bed and under it before she is satisfied. She continues down the hall, her heels punching out their clacks as she enters the next room.

The dissolving pills become bitter and sickening and I let the taste pool up as I walk to the bathroom. I turn a faucet and the medicated saliva mixes with water on its way down the drain. I look up and into the mirror. The mirror helps me brush my teeth and I thank the reflection for meticulously rendering my movements.

"Thanks."

I notice that my black hair needs nurturing. A smile's in there too, though. Fuck the hair; people want to see me smile. I've always pictured...