literature

Featherless

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Literature Text

She’s perched atop the yellow plastic pyramid of a playground roof, knees pulled up against her chest.  Graffiti scrawls by various patients writhe about her toes; various obscenities and gang names worn by the passage of time. Loose wisps of her hair whip to and fro in the breeze.
To her left, the hospital walls loom in layers of white and multicolours. To her right: the car park building and beyond that, the city's buildings with their neon advertisements.  She feels akin to the birds about her; wishes she were light and able to just up and float away from this reality.  

Featherless bird; sitting atop the playground of a children's psychiatric unit, wishing to disappear.
The deep cuts on her thigh, hidden by her skirt and a makeshift tourniquet of toilet tissue and a hair tie, throb reassuringly. She feels a certain comfort in knowing that the nurses have no idea of their existence - she doesn’t want them dressed. Doesn’t want to be cared for.

Pain, she wonders, what is pain? The nervous system’s reaction to bodily damage? So what is it that has her curled up at night, tense and awake and in agony? Emotional pain seems so intangible, so confusing and yet so all encompassing.  Even when her body is not cut, burnt, starved; even then she is under its sway.  She’s so sick of talking; so tired of trying to spit out whatever blackness it is inside her.  Talking never seems to work, and so here she is, silent.  She has decided that the blackness, the badness is actually she, herself. The problem is actually her, and therefore the best way to end the pain is to end herself.

A nurse wanders outside and asks her to come down from her perch. She shakes her head; no.
They stay like this; the nurse standing by the playground, the girl on the roof, until the sky darkens and chills the air.  She climbs down slowly and heads inside. Past the other patients out having their nicotine fix, blowing blue smoke, which curls and fades in the night air.

The ward opens into a dining area and kitchen, where a Polynesian boy is reheating his hospital dinner in the microwave. Behind here lies the brightly lit nurses’ station and the entrance to the High Dependency Unit.  She passes through the dining area, through the lounge where patients and staff alike are avidly watching Shortland Street, to the corridor leading to the girls’ bedrooms.

All of the bedrooms are almost identical; the same anonymous bed with its sheets and blankets marked HOSPITAL in blue (just in case you forget you’re in the nuthouse, she thinks).  Each room has an oil heater on one wall, a cupboard and a closet.  There is a small window in the door, through which the night staff will peer during their checks.  A window looks out over the playground, the car park and the bright lights of the city.  Many a night has been spent standing, watching the traffic lights change rhythmically, like the constant heartbeat of the city.

One night, around 3am, she observed a figure in a pink dressing gown barefoot, stepping so lightly as to almost be skipping.  The figure carried no handbag or backpack; not even a wallet.  As she headed away from the direction of the adult mental health inpatient unit, toward the exit and freedom (to do what?), a security guard intersected her.
“They said I could go! They said I could go!” she insisted shrilly, as the security guard led her to his patrol car, and presumably back to the confines of the unit.

This night, she sits on the linoleum floor, resting her back uncomfortably against the heater, desperate for warmth. She does not bother to turn the light on.
I put it under fiction, although it is mainly autobiographical.
Just experimenting.
© 2008 - 2024 kaylaw
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