All in my Mind

III.

I've already said it, but time is weird. It keeps going in spite of us. It's kind of cruel if you think about it.

Time is even more complicated when you live in a psychiatric facility. Have you heard the saying 'time flies when you're having fun?'

Nobody was having fun here, and time wasn't flying, but it was certainly moving forwards regardless. It just kept pushing on. It didn't care what type of day you were having. Everybody here was relatively unwell, so it's not like they were having many good days anyways. Good days were quite few and far between.

Also friendships weren't much of a thing, at least not for someone like me. Time drags on when you're alone, but I wasn't exactly a socialite. I left all the charisma with Alexander, I suppose. And making friends when you're busy trying to off yourself seems kind of redundant to me. Alternatively, making friends was a sure fire way to waste precious time worrying that you're new friend might off themselves too. At least that's how I perceived it.

Now in the game of time, staff were absolutely key players. They're underpaid and poorly trained. They all hate their lives in some form or fashion, but they have a schedule and they are going to try their damndest to keep it.

I was delivered to the facility right after my birthday. I'm gonna be honest and say I don't remember that time well at all. I've been told that was because I was incredibly deep in psychosis. There's a few weeks or even months at different points in the last few years where I lost time to that. This time period was a rather large gap though. I remember saving the dog as I was falling into the episode. Then when I woke up from it I was in a hospital bed with my wrists held back, and the court order had already been settled against me. My mom had already vouched for me to be put away like this for a myriad of reasons that weren't her fault, and the dog had already died.

I want to be angry that it happened that way, but I'd be dead otherwise. I'd have killed myself, guaranteed. There's no sugarcoating that. I'd already tried so many times anyways.

But in the apparent nine or so months I'd been around, I'd analyzed time quite a bit. I'd analyzed everything about the place actually. I'd profiled the nurses and other staff members. I'd figured out intimate details about them all just through listening. I'd saved a little blueprint in my mind of the building and its programs. I'd memorized the schedule; both the official one and the one shaped by everyone involved.

Like I said before, the doors to my room open at 6am for breakfast. If you haven't gotten up by 7am, then they start sweeping rooms and checking in. Waking up early is supposed to be good for the brain or something. By 8am they'll normally start getting pushy about it, unless it's someone like me. If they know I haven't slept, they tend to leave me longer. There's also a man who thinks he's a rooster about four doors down from me. He does his best to wake us all up at sunrise regardless of the schedule.

If you make it past waking up without dying from the monotony, then there's breakfast. There's almost always a fight. Some people just aren't morning people. I was rarely involved because I don't usually make it to breakfast. I swear that glass delusion has me in a chokehold. Pun intended.

If I did make it to breakfast, then I still wasn't likely to be involved in the fighting. Another disruption came in the form of an episode. I tried not to be the unlucky fucker making a scene at breakfast, but the glass-and-poison-in-the-food thing makes that difficult. I still tend to leave before that, but even if it wasn't me, somebody was probably going to cry at morning meal time.

After breakfast we're allowed to go outside if we want. We have a special fenced yard for it. There was a huge exspanse of unhealthy grass with some picnic tables and a basketball court, but the basket balls were flat and there weren't a lot of people interested in them anyway. The yard was surrounded by that prison fence and topped with barbwire. It was a mood killer for sure. Nobody ever tried to climb though, and sometimes I convinced myself that they were trying to keep others out instead of us in. They were watching us anyways. We knew that and if we tried something crazy, we'd lose our yard privileges in the same way that I'd apparently lost my window for the time being. I currently couldn't get my window to open at all. I'd tried for a while after meeting O'Conner the previous day.