rebekah cowell : “it is just that easy”

In a fluorescent room, who is this, my parents?

 

Where am I – flat on my back?

 

A doctor, what did he say?

 

"Did you mean to kill yourself?"

 

Three days of blankness unnerving me, voices surrounding me.

 

The only voice I search for conspicuously not present.

 

I look my mother in the eyes.

 

"Where is he?"

 

I beg her, the woman I hadn't seen in months. His name trips off my tongue in every breath, yes I wanted to kill myself yes, now where is he?

 

He doesn't want to be a part of this, he's got a lawyer, she says.

 

Why didn't you fight to be by my side? Is this your easy way out of me?

 

Tears run down my wasted cheeks, across the bandage taped to my neck, an I.V. going to my heart – they say it was the last ditch effort.

 

I don't resist a sheet of paper is put under my hand a pen pressed into my trembling fingers - I sign myself in. Psychiatric Ward, I hear.

 

I blank in and out on the wheelchair ride from E.R. to that 4th floor.

 

A metal door clicks, opens, locks behind me.

 

In-take – weigh my scarecrow frame, take a haunting Polaroid so the staff can identify me, measure my bottomed out blood pressure, make my parents go, make them go, oh god, why are they here?

 

Vultures circling around the dead.

 

After midnight, led to a bed in a room of barred windows.

 

I cry myself to sleep.

 

We sit, me and the team of psychiatrists.

 

They probe. Ask, "On a scale of one-to-ten, where do your suicidal thoughts rate?"

 

As if we're doing a survey on favorite colors, favorite foods.

 

Death, they talk about it in the past tense, but it isn't my past, not yet, I'm suspended between the land of the living and the dark place brushing past my feet.

 

You're lucky, I hear. Lucky? Why?

 

I am lost between two worlds, I no longer wish to die, but do I want to live?

 

The I.V. finally goes, shower, I beg.

 

A nurse hands me a bar of soap, no shampoo here, a towel the size of a dish-cloth. A larger towel might tempt me to hang myself.

 

I observe the shower curtain bar - where do they think I'd get the energy to wrap a towel around my neck pass it back across the bar and wait to black out?

 

Warm water washes over and around me, I touch my body, yes, I am alive.

 

I force myself to stand naked before the mirror, bruises line my arms, up and down, every vein poked by needles desperate to find a vein; a lifeline.

 

I look at the wasting flesh – and I look myself in the eyes, a demand to find "me" in that space that goes beyond the cornea and retina; the eyes looking back at me haunting, black circles rimmed in eyelashes.

Flashbacks - memory dragging me down a swirling whirlpool of pain – two bottles of pain pills, I choke on the chalky texture when the pills hit the back of my throat – lay down on my bed, turn over on my side, drop into everlasting nothingness.

 

For three days, they pumped me full of fluids, charcoal, drugs, my body floats around the peripheral edges of my mind.

 

I sit on the toilet seat and cry like a baby, a nurse raps on the door - barges in, she looks down at me, I see pity I don't like it.

 

"Go away!", I say defiantly.

 

"I'm giving you five minutes." She huffs off.

 

I put the sickly green hospital gown back on, my clothes cut from my body upon arrival. Nothing of me remains – I could be anyone, no one – my possessions, my identity – start over, I hear – like it is just that easy.

 

Rebekah Cowell is a graduate of UNC with a degree in Philosophy & studies in Piano Performance.  Ms. Cowell has pieces published or forthcoming in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, Prick of the Spindle, The Blotter Magazine, The Independent Weekly & The Maine Switch. Full-time mother to an amazing toddler, Hannah - Ms. Cowell writes in all her spare time ( i.e.; when Hannah sleeps).

 

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