Well, I’m back. I don’t know if you know me well enough to care, but a lot has happened during the past couple days. I got a new roommate, and Jason, my nurse, got engaged (I’m still not sure if it’s a man or a woman, he said Alex. Not that it really matters, but I wanna get to know the guy that wipes my butt.) I appreciate him. If people like Jason didn’t exist, the world would be poopy. Literally (or figuratively? I never know how to properly use that word; well, those words) if people like him weren’t around the entire world would be covered in feces. And also no doctors would ever know what to do, patients would get so depressed that they’d pull the morphine cord one too many times, and mental nineteen year old guys would be entirely emasculated and ignored. He always makes sure to sneak me some pudding or arm wrestle me (right v. right, since I still have my arm in a cast form the “suicide attempt”) or, sometimes, very rarely, he’ll bring me a cool new book he read. He brought me porn once, but that was just awkward and awful for both of us. I did appreciate the sentiment though.
Anyways, I now have a new roommate. He’s pretty cool but he’s also very weird. When he was first bed-wheeled into the room (he was on one of the older mobile beds that squeaked a little – he had come from the ER), I said hi and he ignored me. That stung a little bit. He was a seemingly tall man, skinny, but oddly enough he was muscular. He had this curly hair, it must’ve been plain sucky brown at one point but now it was greying and made him look like an old rock star. My roommate had the energy of a rockstar too, enough to be able to name himself, without sounding like a completely pretentious poopyhead. He was very hairy, to the point where you couldn’t see the skin of his arms and he had a strong five-o’clock shadow. He was one of those magnetic people who, no matter who you are, you want to follow and want to be liked by. And I swear to Gosh, I’m straight, but his Pierce Brosnan vibes make him seem awfully attractive. Then, after Jason high-fived me and left, he turned and started talking to me. Then, I noticed is his eye patch, blood was leaking from the side of the bandage.
“Hi, my name’s Jim, I have one nutsack, I’ve been shot in the eye twice, and there’s three people I have to kill once I get out of here.”
Well that’s a loaded statement. I stared in awe as the eye leaked and he looked at me in confusion.
“Hello? Son, I know this is a mental ward, there was no room in the regular recovery unit, so just tell me if you’re retarded or batshit. It’ll make it easier on both of us.”
“No, I’m not crazy sir!” Well, that’s not really true, as far as I know, as far as Jason told me. But the words flew out like caged vicious birds, desperate for the new figure’s approval. If you can’t tell by my sporadic eloquence, I wanted to be a writer, before this whole mental patient thing.
“Well then, why the fuck are you in here?” Gosh darn it. Now if I tell him the reason I’m here, he’ll know I lied about not being crazy. I can’t lie and say I don’t know because that’s exactly what a damaged person would say and he’ll figure me out. I can’t tell him I’m an ICU overflow like him – I’ve been in here for too long for that, plus I don’t know anything about the recovery unit in this hospital.
“I guess, I don’t know. They say there’s something wrong with my brain, they don’t know what it is yet, though.”
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I miss her. The voices miss her too.
“Anyway, got a name?”
“Charles Scott.” But instead of Charles Scott, I said my real name.
Oh my gosh!
You’ll never know my real name. That’s amazing. So one of these days when I get out of here, and I’m roaming the Earth, I might sit next to you on the bus, or train, or plane, or when you’re picking up your coffee and you’ll never know it’s me. You have no way of knowing if the chubby but somehow also lanky chestnut-haired guy with really stupidly blue eyes, is me, or someone entirely other. There is a beauty to being known entirely but to also to being totally unknown. The siren of the internet.
“Why do you have such a boring name?”
I shrugged, simultaneously hating my parents for my boringness.
After a particularly lasting silence, I asked my new roomie,
“So what happened to you?”
“Now that, is not boring. Do you want me to start from the beginning?”
“Where else would you start?”
“Kissassey but smart choice. Well, it all started when my girlfriend of five years broke up with me on the phone.”
Now the rest of that is so fascinating, but it’s so late at night and I think the Ambien they give me for my insomnia is working so I really want to sleep. They also tell me to rest, but I don’t know how sleeping with stop the voices. They usually get worse at night but the Ambien makes me blackout sleep, without any dreams and fears and feelings. And I don’t know if that’s better than before but all I know is I have to post this and continue as soon as possible.
Thank you so much for reading.
I really hope we do meet in person someday, when I get out of here. But until then or until I can continue my roommate’s story, farewell!
Your Friendly Local Hospital Kid,
Charles Scott
