Blue Moon
7/31
Solarium 9pm
The Solarium is the temple, here at the state hospital. Tonight is a blue moon, the second full moon this month. I can’t see it from inside my fishbowl. This square room at the back of the unit with windows on three sides. Shatterproof windows, smeared with prints of the fingers and faces that have pressed to them, as hard as they can, to lean as closely to freedom as possible.
Inches, only inches.
Standing in here I see a tree with berries, an outside sky with a plane and a street. With nice houses. Old renovated brownstones with summer flowers bloomed in the front. Montrose, I think, is the street. I can watch the cars. I can watch the planes, all the planes! The evidence of transit, movement.
“S’good to stand. We been sittin’ around so much my butt hurts.” Rosa just said to Markus behind me.
O’Hare…Midway maybe. Rising and dipping like condors from one of these points. Those hallow metal sausages with wings, the passengers cutting so quickly through the air. But stuck still. Muscles crusting over with the crab-shell of inertia, bound to such limited indoor boundaries of motion, like I am. Eating from stale lunch trays, too.
This place is like an airplane. More like a ship. I can feel it wave, sometimes. The illusion of going somewhere. The creak of the poop deck boards protesting the heft of human weight.
“Do you like the food here?” Mona just asked Rosa behind me. I didn’t hear her response.
Fuck, I’m starving! Only 11 more hours until breakfast…
* * *
The Solarium door swings open. Elena swoops in with a classic movie star entrance, tossing her black silk hair over one shoulder, bathrobe becoming a mink.
“It’s happy hour!” she proclaims and tosses her hands like “tada”!
Elena is entirely too amused by this mental patient thing. She loves her pills and the “zonkty” (as she puts it) way they make her feel. She gets a kick out of going to psychotherapy group and flitting about in a hospital gown like some kind of trapped and medicated butterfly.
The Solarium door swings shut and Elena zips on her tiptoes down the hall, to the nurses’ station at the front of the dayroom for her Celexa, Zyprexa and Ativan. I hear Rosa and Markus and Mona’s hospital slippered feet pad across the chilly tile floor and I don’t want to follow.
I can tell it’s a blue moon. All I can do is stare, stare at the milky lunar glow and how it illuminates everything, the tree with the berries, the faraway airplanes in soothing tones of silver. I should be out there. I should be at the lake, on the beach with the breeze and the rocks and the water, slick feet kneading the seaweed, hands wet, singing.
Singing. I can do that here. Rosa and Markus and Mona are gone. The staff checks on me, though, every 15 minutes, to make sure I’m not trying to cut myself with something or have sex with someone.
Bedtime 10:15pm
What to do when I’m out of here:
-Apply for student loans
-Dye hair (Cherry red?)
-Wax eyebrows
-Clean up bedroom
***-Find job
-Finish River Story
-Pay phone bill
*-Find rent $
-Tell people where I’ve been
-Go swimming!
I am sharing a room with Nancy and Carol. Carol is in the bathroom. She farts and it echoes. Nancy is sitting calm on her bed and flipping through a magazine with that dazed-cow look in her eyes. Body still. Wax museum still. Except for the tick-tock motion of her wrist as it turns the glossy pages.
I am with them in the first room, right next to the nurses’ station, because I am monitored so frequently. Which is my fault. For being honest. I wanted help. My perceptions had lost all grounding. I was believing every single story my galloping brain came up with. Listening to that voice that sounds like me, just like me but isn’t me. It is deeper and much crasser than my usual internal narrator. It talks seductively about train car headlights and deep waves. Handfulls of pills washed down with whisky and strange men beaconing “baby, com’ere” from cars in the alley behind my building at night.
Sometimes it is happy. Chittering. Falling in love. With everything. And then I’m in love with everything. Sunset glittering through tree leaves, the white tall buildings of Edgewater, where I live glowing orange in it. Everyone that I see, I swear I know and I love. From some other lifetime, I bet. That old man with the gentle brown eyes was my mother. The really tall guy that lives down the hall was my best friend. The baby that rests in the lap of a tired woman in a McDonald’s uniform on the train was my wife. But mostly it’s sexual.
This particular facet of my psychosis tossed me out horny on hot streets at night and then landed me here. I can fall in love with just about anyone for a few hours. Spill my affections for their every nuance, love them for their accent, their blinking, their shoes, whatever it is. The way they remind me of someone I fucked in the past. The way they remind me of me. Or at least I’m convinced that they do.
I must have them inside me. Make them me, once again. Perhaps the people I meet are simply projections of my imagination. I want to reclaim them as mine.
* * *
“Turn them lights off! You, white girl.” Carol just hobbled out from the bathroom. A trail of spicy stink has clung to her gown. A med fart. I know that smell. Like rotting hummus. The smell of a psych ward bathroom. The pills fuck with your stomach. I have been to 5 of these places.
“Hey, whitey-white. You wit yo blondie, blonde hair and yo light blue eyes. I know you. You so cute, but yo evil!” Carol’s gravely voice squeaks high on that last word. Is she talking to me? I’m not blonde. But I’m the only white girl here. My hair is a dingy gray-brown, “mousy” they call it, my eyes are deep green. A murky, Chicago River green. Polluted. They were blue when I was a kid.
“Shut off that light.” Carol stops in front of my bed and continues. On second thought, I don’t think that everyone I meet could be merely a hologram of my mind. Most people are so predictable. They remind you of at least 5 other people you know. A few set human molds, a blend of a few lifestyle and mannerism options. But others, like Carol, are otherworldly. Or maybe hyper-worldly. Wild, primal, undomesticated.
Just look at her. Hunchbacked but strong boned. Wrinkled raisin skin, tight fuzz of nappy, yellow-white hair in clumps on her head. Her lips pump, sucking her toothless mouth, like an angry bulldog puppy. Those eyes that swirl deep as if under 2 inches of water.
I couldn’t have made her up. Not Carol. Those things she says. What the fuck?! She’s absolutely unpredictable. A creature not to be taunted. Which is why I am putting my journal down and getting up now to shut off the light, as she’s asked me to.