The sun brimmed hotly in the sky, and the rehab center seemed to melt in his vision. Yes, this was the one. The one where he would stop using his ketamine, the treatment that his parents thought would damage his brain. Depression was a bitch. But ketamine made things clearer, fuller, no longer gray and black.

Ravens wheeled the sky. They plucked worms from their beaks, they ate from the leftover cans of pop and food that were left, abandoned by the other teenagers that occupied this lone building in the middle of Montana. The mountains were claimed it would sober people up. The horseback riding would make people realize their drug use was simply escaping from a problem and only making yourself be dug into a deeper hole. No one welcomed him here. It was hot, and no one came.

The police officer opened the door for him. There was a clerk smiling wanly like a crescent moon, but she didn't really thought that this particular patient couldn't stand smiles. The walls were painted a deep, gashing red. Her smile bled in his vision. It was the one thing he couldn't take his eyes off.
"Welcome to Recovery Hills," she said, devoid of emotion. It all seemed as if his cause was hopeless, that his suggestion of coming to a place like this rather than stay in a hospital for suicide attempts was all fruitless and pointless. The woman took his suitcases, her grip shaking as if they were made of lead. He didn't see the other patients, possibly depressed teens who were drowning themselves in alcohol or using cocaine to escape. They told him it was full of other teens like him. Hopeless teens. Teens who prayed to a God and never got an answer. Teens who thought nothing was going to get better. In a way it was just like another mental hospital he visited nearly all his life. In a way, it wasn't.

"Sonic."
He looked at her, her lips waxy and fake in the light. Her nails looked to be the same material. Her eyes, too, were waxy, like candles, her irises the blue flames that ignited in the voluminous room.
"So you were just transferred from Montana State Psychiatric Hospital?"
A state psychiatric hospital. How humorous. He was basically considered a lunatic because he considered his life worthless and viable to be thrown away by his own hands.
His wrists, marked with brown, ugly scars, itched.
"Yeah, that's right." His voice was strangled, as if he was one of the schizophrenics in the hospital that could barely say a single sentence without feeling suffocated.
"What made you want to come in here today?"
Her voice sounded saccharine sweet, but he knew that sweetness wouldn't help him. If anything, it made him want to go outside and find his father's pistol and color the walls an even deeper shade of red.

The truth was that he wanted to escape the state hospital. It was too cold, too lonely, and after claiming he abused ketamine and marijuana (that he only smoked occasionally), he urged them to send him to a nice facility where he could get some mountain air and readjust his mind off the drugs. When the drugs were the only thing that kept him alive. They made him feel alive and not see anything in a vivid shade of blue, nearly black and ugly like a bruise. His parents were rich. They could afford facilities like this with no problem, and they were willing to try to help their son with anything. They even paid the state hospital in cash, even if Sonic wasn't happy there, with the other men who were child molesters and rapists and schizophrenics who talked to themselves and pissed the bed and threatened to set fire to the place.

They claimed it would help him. Sonic had stayed there for two years before he decided he needed to be somewhere nicer.

His parents ordered many things off Ikea catalogs. They went shopping at Pier One Imports daily, giving their rooms a nice sea green color, blue and green with many mechanical fish floating on the walls, while their son slept in a room that was completely bare, filled only with a few books and a little cup that reminded him to take his pills. He tried Prozac. He tried Effexor, Zoloft, Cymbalta, he tried nearly every antidepressant currently used for depression. They even had him on tricyclic antidepressants, with no effect. The father and mother, despite their love for their boy, often referred to him as a kind of phantom in the room. He just got up in the morning, ate breakfast, took his pills, then went back to bed. Then in the afternoon he would get up, read the newspaper, maybe a book, then get back to bed. At night, dinner, then maybe some night reading about people more depressed than him. Then back to bed. And the cycle continued. And when his parents offered him to stay over at his friend's from school, he would reply, "I have no friends", or if they offered him to go out on a trip he would say, "I don't want to go anywhere that has to involve you two". Mechanically. He was a machine that even one day no longer wanted to walk and only get on a conveyor belt just to get from place to place. Sometimes he even believed he was a machine and he couldn't feel human and animal happiness. He never said this to anyone in the hospital, however. He believed if he did, he would be put in the Disturbed ward and given heavy medicine to deal with his hallucinations and delusions. He often saw shades of gray and black in people's faces, in the blue leaves that serrated across the morning sky, in the building that was colored a harsh yellow against the blurry red sun, glowing as if he found Christ's promised land. The place he would go to escape everything. Even if the ketamine was the only thing that made him somewhat not suicidal. The pot made him mellow, but he had no desire to smoke it. He hadn't smoked it in the years following the state psychiatric hospitalization.

They allowed cigarettes at least. It cuts an edge to his dismal mood. Whenever God felt like he needed a break.

"I'll show you to your room, Mr. Sonic. And then you can meet the other patients."

She covered her mouth, as if she was a child who said a "naughty" word. "I can't call them patients here, Sonic. The truth is, they can put that label on themselves. But if they don't think they're sick with a drug problem, then they aren't. They may have a physical anomaly that makes them that way. They consider that their hearts don't work right. That they were born with a tumor in their head and it was removed too late. They're in here, if they would like to be considered that way, with physical deformities. Drugs aren't the sole reason they're here. They consider themselves defected. Like broken toys that God no longer wants to play with."

It was strange, really, how she worded everything. That these drug addicts were defective and shattered and smashed apart. People didn't put the label of an "addict" on them. They just considered them as normal patients in a regular everyday hospital. The walls emanated warmness towards him, as the lights glowed a hue of honeyed yellow. He felt comfortable here. He had trouble sleeping for the past month or so, and he knew he would have no trouble sleeping here.

He could hear shouting in the thick vacuous distance of the rehab facility. Glass doors that didn't seem reinforced or locked opened the way for him and his guide. It was a nice change from the psychiatric hospital. The doors would always click and be locked once they were shut behind the staff. He couldn't run anywhere, and they considered a stay of at least six months was needed before an appeal of escaping from the virtual hellhole would be realized. Two years was too much of a long time he wasted being there for depression.

The clients were all either looking at a picture, or watching TV. The TV was a large flat screen, and they were watching soccer. The picture he wasn't exactly sure. It seemed like photos of someone's family, or a particular art piece, but when the rehab center was quiet with only yellowed wandering eyes gazing at the soccer players and the waxy ears hearing the announcer's foreign accent, they began calamitously shouting at the blue and yellow picture, saying that this was where Van Gogh shot himself. This was where he died.

His room was completely white, immaculate, and bare like his room. There was a lone trash can, a small bookshelf to store his books he could buy in the bookshop down the lane from the rehab facility, a bathroom with a toilet connected to many silver pipes hanging on the wall, and a shower that streamed from the ceiling, with a small cake of soap and some generic hospital-brand shampoo and conditioner. The bathroom was also white, pure, as if he would be cleaned and his sins would be washed away in the shower.

The rooms were disappointing, he felt. There was a white dresser along with a small desk that they said he could request a typewriter in case he wanted to write his feelings on a journal or write poetry or whatever mostly alcoholic writers did, but none of the clients here were gifted verbally or, honestly she said, anywhere else. They were just teens like him.

Terribly average, with a wealthy, well-to-do family, and terribly depressed.
They considered their hearts didn't tinker right. Their machine parts weren't covered in the warranty, so they were shipped back here. They had missing parts, particularly their tin brain.

His own kind. Here, at last.

He was patted down to make sure he had no weapons, no drugs brought in. There were none, and she was glad.

His only possessions were a couple of books he borrowed from the state psychiatric library (never returned), a plastic, gnarled toothbrush, half-full toothpaste, three black shirts, two black pants, a hairbrush with half of its bristles plucked out, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter with only a quarter of fluid left. They told him he was only allowed to have his lighter during cigarette breaks. He said he didn't mind, and they confiscated it with no issues and protests.
His books were from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Haruki Murakami, and Catcher in the Rye. He considered Catcher as his Bible, that Salinger knew what it was like being him. Being this defective machine.

She gave him his materials back, and he said thank you and tried to usher a smile. He failed, like this machine was always wonted to do.
He went back to the day room, where they continued to shout over the Van Gogh piece.

"Here! Here, you see that? This is where Van Gogh went and shot himself! This is where he died! The poor son-of-a-bitch."
"He was a rich son-of-a-bitch when he died, that's for sure. Goes to show that America only appreciates you when you're fucking dead."
"Why did this stupid bastard paint sunflowers all the time? Sunflowers are fucking gay, dude."

They were all juvenile delinquents, their vocabulary only consisting of vulgar words and the phrases "that's so gay" and "faggot", that Sonic thought he would hate being gay in a place like this.

One of the teenagers was a red echidna with dreadlocks, knuckles that protruded and nearly stabbed anyone with eyesight. He could tell, from just looking at him, that he once came from the Bronx and was abandoned by his parents and partook in a life of crime and drugs before the police caught him and told him to either go to a nice facility like this, or be sent to prison, tried as an adult.

The other, a black and red hedgehog, mostly sat silently, waiting for them to stop gawking over the photo book of Van Gogh's paintings. It was his book. He thought of Van Gogh as one of his mentors in life. But they kept debating his history, even if the "poor fucking son-of-a-bitch" had autism.
"Nah, he was schizophrenic, dude. Like the rest of these artists who claim they're so fucking loony. Van Gogh saw things. The Starry Night was nothing but a hallucination. He saw those whirls in the sky, those glowing yellow stars, and he said, 'You know what? I'm going to draw me a bitchin' picture.' But even if it was one of the greatest pictures of all time, they never bought it until he shot himself. The only way you can tell people you're worth something is after you're dead and turns out you're an alcoholic or you're crazy. That's all people care about."

The echidna kept rambling about the picture, saying that truly, when you died, your value was more. Not when you were alive. And that was why he once was in a hospital after he tried to attempt suicide. After he got out, the doctors didn't give a damn about him.

"They just filled my little hobo cup full of Prozac and they said Sayonara kid, watch out for suicidal impulses and the fact that you want to cut yourself every two hours. Take a Xanax for that. Call the doctor if he's not on vacation. Moron."

The others peeped at the new patient, their prying eyes opening him up, revealing to them all his secrets. Sonic's hands were bruised, bloody underneath the gloves, and his scars itched again. He made sure not to make his wrist bleed.

"What're ya in 'ere for?" the weasel with one long, sleek fang inching across his face had asked.

Was this weasel depressed? Probably just went here to avoid jail time. He probably committed petty crimes just to get his heroin and not caring at all if he stole from his grandmother's Precious Moments figurines just to grab a few bucks to hook a needle into his arm intravenously as if he was sick and dying from cancer.

He said he was dying from cancer, and it was why he was here.

"I needed the drug, I needed the pot to get away from my pain. Chemo never 'eemed to melt the hair off my hide though. Only women 'perienced dat."

His wrists itched. He rubbed them against the tips of the table.

A red armadillo didn't have to relay his story, to know that he was a drunk who always drank his father's wine since he was five years old, his tongue not even primed enough to enjoy the taste of wine. His mother and father never seemed to care much for him. They let him drink, however much he wanted, always bought alcohol for themselves that he could steal without a word, and they never said anything about it until it started to inconvenience them. Namely, that the beer cans were dirtying up his room and his father was sick of having to buy alcohol every other day.

"They never cared. They just wanted to get drunk too. So I'm stuck here. I can leave whenever I want, but I'd rather be here than be with my parents. I can stay here for the rest of my life for all I care."

There was a woman in the group, wearing a hoodie that Sonic could barely catch a glimpse of her golden eyes. Her drug of choice, he could tell, was Xanax. And she always got it easily.

"I just come in, talk about how nervous I feel when talking about my family, they give me a good four week supply, and I down about twenty pills a day. I have to get a higher dose every day, because you get used to it, and you have to try to get higher every time. Which is why I also smoke crack sometimes, maybe drink a little vodka. Got stuck here because I ran away from home and the police found me and my parents told me to either go here or go to jail for drug possession. And what do you know?"

"As the Cheshire Cat would say, 'We're all addicts here.'"
What the black and red hedgehog was addicted to, he couldn't tell. Maybe benzo's. It was all he could tell from his ability to read thoughts and the faces that glanced at him, disgruntled and in pain over being locked up in a red and gold cage for trying to escape from this reality.
"Party drugs," he said simply. It was all he could tell them. He didn't want them to go further, deeper into his life. Even if they were his people, he couldn't tell them about the inpatient stay at Montana State Psychiatric Hospital for two years. For depression.

"Party drugs? That's baby shit!" the woman said.
"People just take those for like weeks before they get to harder drugs, like heroin, crack, or meth. Be glad you're not taking that shit, because they'll tell you over and over it'll fuck you up."
He left it at that.

The lights oozed in his vision, when they left to go to the all-white cafeteria for their breakfast. The morning broke through the black veil of the night, the stars fading away like old scars, and the sun clamored over the Montana hills to be recognized, to be seen by billions of people all over the world.
The albicant part of the eggs tasted like clouds, the yolk tasted like the sun, and the rough steak tasted like the dirt they were all standing in.

The dirt that he would be a part of, very soon.

"What are those scars on your wrists for? Did you get into a fight with someone?"
A very oblivious, naive inmate had asked him this, and he briefly shut his eyes as he chewed his food, the steak chewy and not at all tender, burnt and nearly raw, and he soon glanced at the wrists again, which throbbed and itched as he rubbed them against the tips of the table.
"Yes."

 

2: #FF2400

I remember the faint scent of my mother’s breath as she cooed over me, letting me drink milk from the bottle. It was warm, and lulled me to sleep. My father was sitting beside me, crooning a lullaby. He loved me. She loved me. They both loved me. Yet I felt despair from the room, wrapping its long icy tendrils over me. I was sad throughout my childhood (except for a brief stint when I was five, but that seemed to be a fluke really) and I cried a lot. That was my excuse for not going to school. I’m sad, go away. I would play video games and listen to my mom crying and I would cry too while I had Mario swing Bowser over a bomb. I killed him. But it didn’t matter. Because I killed my mother.

I lived in Billings, Montana. Always had, probably will for a while. My mother was very attentive to me. I can’t complain about my parents. Never really had, though. Though when everyone learns that I had severe depression, they look at me and think, “Why are you depressed? Your family is rich! They can afford nice things! You’re getting a brand new car when you’re 16! Your mother gives you whatever you want without even asking! They love you and never badly treated you!”

That’s the worst part. I feel like there’s no reason why I feel this deep sadness. It resonated from my gut and just sapped my brain of its strength. I often walk around the house in a zombified way. I never seemed to get enough sleep. Never. I sleep all the time. And it sucks. And I never felt like it was enough. I could sleep for twenty hours a day and still be tired.

I wanted to be away from people. I wanted to be away from my mom and dad, despite that they cared. I shut the door and locked it often. I would eat in my room and never come out, dirty dishes all over the place. It got disgusting that eventually my dad had to be cross and told me I had to clean my room. Didn’t have the energy to. I felt sick, almost like Holden’s history teacher with all the Vicks nose drops and him being in a bathrobe, half naked. My dad soon gave up and cleaned the place himself and I didn’t even say thank you. And that broke me. It broke me good.

It was the worst part, having nice parents. They always did everything for you, meanwhile you felt like you were a terrible, god-awful person for even doing these things to them. My mom soon did my chores and she didn’t say anything. My dad mowed the lawn. They brought my dishes of microwaved food which I ate without even saying thank you and I made my room into a damn pig sty again. And what did I do to show for it? Sobbed on my window and made stupid little suicide notes. That was all I did. They were completely at my mercy and there was nothing I felt I could do. Hitler had power over his people and felt so great about it. Mussolini and Stalin too. But me? I had a power over my people, and I hated it, and I wanted it gone because I had that knowledge that I was this terrible, shitty person, but God, I couldn’t stop it the guilt kept coming and I kept feeling like my heart was rotted and had a hole in it and I wanted to say I was sorry, but soon I lost friends I lost the best friends I ever had over my shit and shit you know I just kind of want to kill myself right now.

Take a deep breath Sonic, and keep telling your story. You’re here to recover. This is what you need.

Okay.

I kept hiding in my room and I kept making plans to kill myself. I took Prozac, I took even Elanvil for Christ’s sake and it never worked. I was thinking of jumping out of my window and falling face flat onto the cement. Splat. And be dead. But then I realized the death was too bloody and gruesome. I got a coil of rope and thought about hanging myself, but man, I thought I was a bit too heavy and I needed to lay off the chili dogs, because my rope broke when I tried to do it on my closet. And I think my stuff fell on me and it was awkward explaining that to my father.

I had this power over everyone and while my friends hated me they would sit still and listen to my bitching and whining and then they would say “I wished I could help, but I gotta go to Chicago” or some shit, and man, I wished they could help too, but everyone tried to help and nothing really helped and I was just going further in my depression.

I went to my doctor and they kept prescribing colorful little pills that would make me happy and I said No, that doesn’t work. It was like deciding which candy was tasty for you, but all of them tasted like black licorice. I got into drugs a bit when my doctor kept prescribing more candy for me to chew on. Effexor, Pristiq, Lamictal, it all tasted like shit and I started smoking pot.

It helped. For a half hour or so. Then I would suddenly be hungry and I would eat an entire big bag of Cheeto’s and half of a sub sandwich. I gained weight, and I hated it. I avoided pot for a while, but when I thought I was beginning to get worse and angry in my depression and shutting myself out again, I smoked it again, and a half hour would pass where I would actually laugh at things and be happy, but then I would be succumbing to depression again. Depression was nothing but a black python squeezing me and threatening to swallow me whole, and it was when I…

When you what Sonic?

Do I even need to tell you guys?

You should. It’s important for your recovery. For your mental recovery and your physical recovery, as you said your body is full of gears and sprockets that don’t work right.

Well, I…

You said a machine can’t express emotions, and you are. You’re hiding your face right now.

…

It’s okay, Sonic.

Okay.

I slit both of my wrists. Several times. I tried to see if I could find bones in there. I wanted to bleed so I would know I was alive and a hedgehog, you know? Not a machine? Well, I bled black oil from both of them. My systems were malfunctioning. I was fading away and my mom and dad saw me and asked me why I did what I did. I said I wasn’t sure. Just that I wanted to cease all programming so the zeroes and ones could be realigned and stop bothering me.

Just so you know Sonic, we’re not going to write down that you’re delusional. Your beliefs are important, and they should never be shut down.

Right.

Continue.

Well… I got sent to a hospital. They didn’t really like me there. They said I was very sick and I needed to be sent somewhere far away. I was sent to a state hospital. They said I was so sick that I needed to stay there for two years.

And how did you get there?

Party drugs. I was using party drugs. And some doctor said I was addicted, I guess. Even though at the time, they were prescribed to me.

Really?

Yeah. He prescribed them to me and said it would help with my depression. And for a while, it did. It really did. Those colors never seemed to bleed in my eyesight. The leaves looked green. The black and white never seemed to haunt me. I smiled. I laughed. I was a very happy hedgehog. Like I used to be when I was about five. But another doctor came along, said I was addicted, and this doctor lost his license over giving them to me. And it was the only thing I ever felt that was close to normal. But to tell you the truth Nurse, I’d rather be here than that state place. It was awful. It constantly smelled bad, I felt like everything was dirty and black and white and gray, and I felt if I stayed there any longer I really was going to somehow try and kill myself. It's happened before. Someone actually hung himself with some sheets and I’m not sure how that got under the radar, but it happened, and some staff were fired over it.

Since I was a bit of a veteran they made me wash the floors and do other activities and you know, I would pretend I was deaf like Chief Bromden. Sometimes I wished I was blind so I wouldn’t see those terrible things sometimes though. The rapists dragging the women out, whipping it out, before the staff comes over and gives them an injection of that Thorazine or whatever. Haldol sometimes too, if the case called for it.

Were you ever injected with it, Sonic?

Once. And after that, I behaved. I never wanted to be injected with that shit ever again.

Yeah, just to let you know, we only do that in dire emergencies. And it’s only Ativan. Ativan isn’t as bad as say, Thorazine or Haldol.

The name sounds nice. Ativan. Atta, van!

Did you take some ketamine before you got here?

Yes.

You’re new here, so we can’t suspend you for that. You just took the drug before the trip, right?

Right.

But next time, we can’t be cordial about it. You’ll be back to the state hospital before you know it.

Yeah, I know Nurse, but… I feel okay for once on it. I feel like I’m alive in it. Every other time, I feel dead. This is the only time I’ve ever been happy with anyone before.

(The other inmates smell dinner being cooked. The nurse stands up from her chair and shakes Sonic’s hand, telling him that there will be more interviews in the future.)

You best be going to get dinner. Mashed potatoes, peas, and it seems like they’re also bringing out the meatloaf. You’re in luck. It’s an award-winning specialty of ours.

Nurse, can I ask you a question?

Go ahead.

You… don’t really think I’m like, some kind of automated machine made by God just to carry out the most basic of functions in this life, do you?

…

Nurse?

… Well Sonic, I think, in a way, we are all like that. All machines made by God. Carrying out our processes. Our functions. And making society function as a whole. We’re all little bits of data in a much larger program.

I feel like I’m a very big program, though, Nurse. I feel like I can one day…kill someone. Like I was a machine programmed to really…

You’re hungry, right?

Yeah, I’m very hungry, but…

You need to eat. Your wiring isn’t right. You need to process that food into energy using your little meatloaf-processing machine and your peas-processing machine and your mashed potatoes…

I don’t have those functions. I ate this morning, but I felt very sick. I think I wasn’t meant to eat. I think I’m just like other machines, only needing… well, oil and stuff. I don’t need this food. I never needed it. I always felt sick when I ate.

Tell us more about that.

Well, I would eat something, and my body wouldn’t react to it right. I would throw it up. And I would just be, well, nervous I guess. I don’t have a stomach. Machines don’t need food or energy and I don’t have any of those conversion processes that allow me to eat like normal people do.

(She looks very confused, somewhat frightened by his delusions. She shifts and squirms in her seat uncomfortably, and wants to bring the interview to a close. She smiles her waxy moon smile, the kind of smiles that Sonic had grown to hate, and she pats the machine on the back, the machine unable to process affection. Suddenly, the blue hedgehog was unable to speak. His wiring short-circuited, and his world was cast off into hues of black and blue and gray again. And he cries into his mashed potatoes.)

 

3: #E62217

Something had happened, that is all I can tell you. My soul was lost somewhere in the middle of trying to become a decent person. It happens to a lot of us. But it’s been many years and I never got it back, and I feel like it was utter hell just to find a thing that may had never been there in the first place, so I felt like giving up a lot. Instead, I focus on how I lost the thing than rather how I can get the thing back. I focus on the people that may have caused me to lose the thing and I focus on the things that actually weren’t really good or helpful and had hurt me instead. I had therapists who referred to my coping strategies as a “toolbox” but the truth they never realized was that I probably had most of the tools I needed, but I truly didn’t even know how to use any of them. They give me this thing that is supposed to help, but I feel so crushed under the weight of things I don’t even realize are hurting me and my mechanical parts weren’t lubricated enough to avoid these heavy things. Immobilized like a snake lying under a blanket of snow. Take it they say, take it. It will help you. But it’s far away from me. Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you say. The black ocean thrashed me away from you and I felt I wasn’t with anyone anymore with a rational mind. Reality had succumbed to the realness of fantasy inside my brain.

When I was a child, I had a fever. My mind couldn’t piece together the rationalities that my parents and friends had always known and had always lived with. They were unfamiliar. As I feared monsters hiding under my bed with red glowing eyes, when I feared I was in the throes of growing older that things would suddenly start making sense. And later, I wouldn’t be sure if it really did.

What happened, God?

Children will start asking a million questions and parents would often get tired of us wondering about this world. Sometimes I viewed this a child getting ready to see things the way their parents do, when things go in order, are concrete and tangible, logical and rational. I asked questions a lot and got the right answers. Then I think later on when I got sick with that blue fever, I thought the numbers would start with 1 then 2 and 3 and 4 then I wasn’t sure why but I thought 20 went after that. In a Social Studies class I thought the Indians truly didn’t deserve to have their land taken away and we should’ve been more apologetic. They mentioned the Trail of Tears, but the teacher never thought showing some sort of History Channel video about it was necessary. I wanted to know what it was like to cry back then and to have something dear to you truly be taken away from you. I had everything, yet I felt everything in my life was vacant and no one had ever truly loved me. People do too love you they said, but I couldn’t comprehend why they would. I sympathized with some people that no longer existed and I believed numbers truly didn’t have to go in the right order and colors could shine on anything they wished.

It was nice to be lost in the forest, it was so quiet there, unlike the rest of my head. I wished it was still there. They took me to this Montana facility to see the forests.

Yet when I fell asleep, I expected things to be different. Like the instant I would be admitted to this facility my life would turn brighter, and things would begin to resolve and I could see through the fog that surrounded that oily sea that had plagued me for so long.

I woke up in the cold bed with thin sheets, the sun hiding beneath the forest that I had praised would help me, and when my parents were excited I would go to a high-rate facility than the state hospital I was in for two years of my life, I was reminded that I was still who I was, that I had always awoke to a morning with no reason for waking and I was afraid that brief happiness I had was dissipating and there was nothing I could do to make it stay for a little longer in the missing part of my soul.

It’s not enough, I realized. It’s not enough.

 

4: #F70D1A

Cold eyes took a long stare at me, from the red disguise of his eyes.

The eyes were as frozen as his fingers.

Nicotine couldn’t warm them. Drugs and solace could warm everything else but misery.

Confusion was warm, thrilling. There was nothing more than I wanted to feel.

Space cadets could see the glow of the contours of my head. I was Jesus, raking along this promise land.

An Elysium fantasy land in an asylum. Fantasy coveted me. It muffled the sounds and screams.

Is this uncomfortable?

Do you want me to stop?

Can I stop?

Would I be able to stop?

So,

I thought,

I thought you would.

Wouldn’t expect this from me. I was supposedly normal. The cold eyes had become my normal affront.

Would find sanity eluding from you, the ghost as it slips into the crevices into my sockets.

Seeing was believing, and blindness was ignorance. That was possibly why Homer was the only man I grew to respect.

He’s dead. Skeletons I could still respect, even if they’re six feet under.

Wasn’t expecting me to say that? To see your hopeless and concerned face?

Sunshine eluded me too. But that happened years ago.

It wasn’t what you wanted. What you expected to find from me.

The eyes felt dead to you. Cold, unfeeling, they stared only at their own Mecca thousands of miles away.

Serve me my chalice of malice.

Did anyone ever see what I had seen? Felt and tasted? Senses were dulled, slowly.

The canvas around me was painted with only one shade of red, but everything else was gray.

The veil that clutched onto the paintings of the sky outside that told me what kind of world was still alive,

Was often clawed by me. Ripped apart. Disguises were destroyed. I wanted to find my way through this tunnel.

I looked out the window. There was nothing there.

There was no show that I thought I might go to eventually. There was no one that was still alive who could hear me breathe.

A little pinprick was felt in my heart. There was no pain, but I was receding.

Tell me. Speak to me.

Was I still okay?

You can tell the truth. I wouldn’t mind if you said no.

If the answer was no, I would go into some sort of existential crisis and a nervous breakdown and become a hermit that wrote only stories full of antagonistic characters that were only frontispieces to how I had constantly felt.

That really isn’t a big deal though. It happens to everyone. It happened to Pan many years ago. As you figured, he died.

The pipe was still there on the ceiling of my room, licked by his fellowship of rats.

They had once flocked to his music, but rats ate at his shoes instead. Do not ask me for the story. I don’t know what happened.

Sunshine, maybe his flute became faulty. Maybe it couldn’t wake dawn anymore. Light never pierced the dark paint on His window. It hadn’t since seven days ago. The days felt too much like millions of years. 

 

5: #F62817

Programs had the unfortunate incident of shattering their head when people had slammed them into the ground. Maybe this happened to me. Cruel hands had apprehended me and felt I should fall on their floor. Carelessness and haplessness was to be blamed. Not because I could feel from the blood running through their veins through their wrists and the pulse that had emanated from their flesh that they had hated me, but things had happened for so long like this that soon humans no longer felt there was any reasonable explanation for why they were here. They called them accidents. Some were called Happy Accidents. An isolated incident.

Look at the pieces that fell from me. They once shone so brightly like the sun. Cold steel was felt from my thin fingertips. The pulse that once lived inside these pieces of me had died away. No fight was given. Dying was the only thing that felt reasonable to do at this point.

Look at them, I said. Look at them!

They called me a crazy diamond before. The shards from my faces had fallen. Flakes of my personality, the edifice on which people had believed was really me.

Being okay was the best feeling in the world. Not being happy, not being rich, not being wise and not being powerful and manic. I just wanted to feel okay for once. The flesh poles I walked by when I wanted to try to resume my normal life didn’t want to hear any other answer about your current state other than “okay”. Or “fine”. Maybe feeling fine was fine too. My brain was sore from the many emotions I felt other than “fine” and “okay”. There is such a thing as being too compassionate, too loving and too caring and too feeling and too sympathetic and too emphatic. Feeling too much was taxing. There was too much enjoyment in the things I did. Running around my nice neighborhood. Playing the nice video games I could afford. Talking to the friends that had once been there in the form of pixels and personas that anyone who lived in my parent’s world could tell was fake. They told me that they never were there and they were only lost spirits roaming around the modems and conflagration of data that we felt was now useless to us, but their hearts were there, in their words. I could feel their hugs, I could taste their tongues, I could take shelter in the warmth of their symbols and emoticons that expressed happiness and gratitude.
I was envious of them later. They had attained the ability to be “okay”. They floated through life, indifferent to anything else that happened than their favorite shows or comics or video games. That world was sacred to us, the fake phantasms that worshiped the phantasms of creative people’s minds. I heard of tales of experimenting with drugs and LSD and picking up cigarettes, even of brands that they truly didn’t care for, just to show this entire universe of data and images and malware and spyware that they were real, not a fictional creation.

I smoked cause of them. Maybe I wanted to convince you that I was real. My name was Sonic, certainly. I had to tell that fact to myself when I woke up every day. I had to remind myself that I was still someone and I hadn’t been swallowed away by the ocean. The shore was still there. It was just as black, but God, I thought it was pretty, when the moon shone on it. The safe places in that haven I once lived in were made of porcelain, and the shore was just as fragile as anything I had ever felt I was.

I used to be loved and admired and appreciated. They thought I was funny and cute and even sexy. This wasn’t me anymore. You realized that all along, I knew. Depression swallowed people up in increments until the person they once was, now had eyes that often felt like cancerous black holes from the sky.
I talked to myself too often, the pages had been painted in a different direction. My friends loved me. Then I thought it would be wise to no longer love myself. Then the love they had for me had died.

Depression was another person entirely. The blue fever was an evil twin, a doppelganger that believed the only reason they were here was to ruin everything you once had. Because the blue fever itself didn’t had anything. So, in the end, all traces of your former personality was lost to be just like them. Depression, I felt, was so jealous that it had to take everything away from me because if it couldn’t have anything, I couldn’t either.

Who was this figure?

Maybe this fever once experienced loss too. Then it obsessed over it. All day it thought about the loss. The spider of thought crept up into its mind. Then the loss was an abscess and all feelings the fever once had were absent.

Okay. It wanted to feel okay too.

Humanizing the things that were slowly killing you made things somewhat better. You were still dying, but you sympathized with this thing that truly didn’t have a face and didn’t care one way or another if you recovered or you succumbed to it.

There was no pulse in that depression either. I felt the pulse in that girl’s wrist. I felt the sickened pulse of the shards of me that still shone. I cried for the moon. It was honestly the only rational thing to do at that moment. The shore was so far away, but I could see its starry glint, and I felt I could still make it and see the ones who had truly loved me.

Diamonds were harder than any substance. Diamonds originally came from the dirtiest and blackest place on the Earth. But they shone when they were born. I whispered to myself that I still had to shine on, even if I was crazy.

6: #E42217

There was often a crowded silence that was louder than any of the words I had thought up in my head to comfort myself from the realization that there were about six billion people on this planet of ours and it was possibly the only planet that would ever have any trace of intelligent, solid life in a galaxy that stretched longer than God’s hands, and I was alone.

The silence ruptured from a wound of a promise broken.

I held onto someone who I believed was real in my arms. Maybe they were warm if they had tangible flesh and fur and heart and empathy, but the loneliness was colder. It was possibly the coldest thing I had ever felt.