Notable Occasions on the Calendar of Dread

The layout of the facility was welcoming, initially. Long corridors of hallways and rooms to occupy your time, and many intricate places to leave your mind abandoned so you could actually have a free moment to yourself. However, the nurses watched everything, loathing each and every being that came through those big wooden doors. Every fifteen minutes, on the fucking dot, the checked every person in the entire wing to measure their whereabouts, and to make sure everyone was safe.

After the ordeal with Anna, I slouched myself down in the hallway outside the room deemed mine, locked of course from the outside, so I would need a nurse to open it, and then they would know exactly where I had planted myself.

Slouching down next to me, was Genevieve, the only person I allowed myself to get closest too. I watched as the big wooden doors opened, on account of the activation key being slid into the identifying mechanism, another new patient being thrust down the hallway, this time, in a wheelchair.

"When do checks start up again?" Genevieve whispered into my ear as the new patient was wheeled down past us.

"Three minutes," I said, calculating the time from the last check; the only clock the hospital so thoughtfully provided was hanging, looming above the nurses station.

"They have no reason to come over to us," She said, quietly.

"Don't worry, they'll find one," I sneered back.

"I talked to Jake today, on the phone," Genevieve said to me.

"And?" I questioned.

"He'll help," she said, proudly.

I'll admit it, it was a full blown, ludicrous, young adult cop drama novelesque plan. And now it seemed more unattainable than it had almost a day ago, when the idea first trickled into Genevieve's mind.

She wants to escape; the thought ran by me like a billboard, solid for a second, then gone, but real. She thought the perfect partner to complete such a varying task would be the guy she "dated" for two weeks, who visited her once and then deemed she was too crazy to get involved with, or that the place was too full of crazies.

I knew somewhere in the mess of my mind, in a filing cabinet stored in a dirty, dusty corner, that the only real way I would ever get out of this place was to either hurt myself enough to have a straight ticket to the morgue, or escape. One seemed more pleasureable some days than the others.

"I'm in," I whispered before I could stop myself. How was I even going to get from here, back to anywhere near appropriate to life, without being questioned by everyone in my life circle. You've been discharged? Why didn't you tell me? I could hear their questions echo through my head.

"They can't catch both of us, not at once," she started, as if there was some sudden self doubt.

"Besides, you were athletic in high school," she added, bring back her smile.

I knew now that Genevieve was more whacked out of her mind than anyone probably ever thought. We're just going to have to stay; we're in a prison, and all we have left to do is serve out our sentence. What were we going to do it we got out? Live in the streets? Learn the tools of the trade along the way? We were just two more girls, among everybody else, trying to make sense of this battered world.

I ignored her comment and huffed, thinking about where my sister was in this moment; probably finishing up work. Maybe minutes, maybe hours, from where I was. Maybe it would be a whole other day before she came and visited me.

I was not able to think with these thoughts in my head, I stretched my feet out in front of me, my five foot frame not looking too impressive against the long hallway. Every bone in my legs cracked as I did, and I masked the discomfort of the sensation with a deep inhale of the musty, trademark scent of nearly every dwelling I'd been in. Standing up, I walked over to the nurses station, asking for the bathroom to be unlocked, and the nurse granted my wish.

Standing alone in the tiled sanctuary, I turn my head and look and the toilet, and question how many times of beating my head against the porcelain it would take to register me unconscious. I brush the thought aside, and walk over to the sink, examining my face in the mirror, sliding the skin under my eyes down, looking in the white, then blue parts of my eyes. railing my finger down the bridge of my nose, something my grandmother used to do to help me sleep as an infant. I claw at the flesh about my cheekbones, examining the pore littered about my face, and look up at my hair. My hair had been short, recently after I arrived at the ward; I stole a pair of scissors from behind the nurses station during my intake evaluation, and hid them in the elastic waistband of the hospital sweats I was changed into. That night, after spending so much time inside my own head, I began chopping, quick sudden movements all around my face, until I could no longer feel the medusa hair climbing around me. Some things are better left short.

During the checks that night, the nurse stumbled into my room upon me taking the scissors across my wrists, etching blood into the tiles floor. She dragged me out, despite my messy screaming and sobbing, fighting and spitting. She had no hair to pull me by (which may or may not have been part of my plan) and it took three orderlies to drag me down the hallway. I was treated for my self inflicted wounds, and sent to be evaluated, before earning a room with a tenant, to watch my every move.

Her name was Erin--I will always remember the way her hair hung around her green eyes and frail body. She told me she liked my new hair style, as choppy as it probably was, and that she had been doing her seventh hospital stay on this particular floor. I was back to a single room within the week, sicne she had been pucshed back into residental treatment. News came days later of her suicide--I always wondered what the bullet felt like going through her face.

Notes

Potential trigger warning.