All in my Mind

XVI.

Before you freak out, you should know  I swallowed the pills sometime in the middle of the night. Crisis averted.

It turns out that sleeping is practically impossible when you've been taking pills before bed every night. Regularly sleeping through the night meant I didn't have the gumption to go sit and stare out my window. After what felt like several hours, I couldn't lie awake anymore. I was going to spiral out or something. I'd started picking at my skin and clenching my jaw. I swallowed the pills.

I was feeling quite weak about it all. I was also noting that this was embarrassingly fickle of me. Do I really stand for so little?

To be clear, none of the motivations I had for skipping the pills in the first place had changed. I was still wallowing in guilt or whatever.

Psych meds are delicate. You really need to take them at the same time each day or else the system falls out of balance. Clozapine is specifically testy (I think that's what it is, but honestly they could change it and I wouldn't know). Either way, I slept till noon that day, and when I woke up I didn't move for a while.

Nurse Taylor even had to come check on me. She and I were on a friendship hiatus though(we were never friends), because she couldn't stop talking about me with Lily. I didn't tell her that either. I didn't give any inclination that I didn't consider us kosher. I actually just let her pull out clean clothes for me. She gave me a pre wrapped cookie that had a bat on it, and I made the assumption that it was maybe close to Halloween now. That tracked because O'Conner had told me it was almost October and now several weeks had passed. I didn't ask for details.

Nurse Taylor came back again a little later and reminded me that lunch was ending soon. Then she hovered in the doorway and eyed me suggestively like I was missing something. I was slightly more lethargic that day, but I gathered after a moment she was reminding me of my non official obligation to my acquaintance Lily. She hadn't done that  quite so obviously before.

This was really getting out of hand.

Lily spent most of the meal silently sorting the cucumbers on her plate into careful rows after I arrived. I don't want to mislead you into thinking I cared, but I did notice that as the mealtime came to a close and people filed out of the room, Lily hadn't actually gotten around to eating them. And I didn't care or anything, but I also noticed that she wasn't a great eater. She picked at her meals childishly and ate like it was a secret. I'd noticed that she was a very small and petite person; that her clothes hung off of her quite a bit so I couldn't see what she actually looked like underneath. I didn't care or anything, but I noticed these things and maybe I'd wondered about them before.

I was maybe a little bit perturbed about this next bit, but I'd noticed that she hadn't bothered much to talk to me for the duration of the meal either. That was odd. I didn't really want her to talk to me. It was just something I'd come to expect, and now she was withholding it.

If I cared, I'd have asked if maybe something was wrong. Something was obviously wrong. We were in a mental facility, so something being wrong was really supposed to be the assumed baseline. Except she was never like that. Lily always stood out because she looked oddly coherently minded all the time. She smiled and acted happy and maybe occasionally insecure, and it didn't make sense that she now looked down and awkward and sad.

And it was making it really uncomfortable for me to just sit there and ignore it. I'd finished picking apart my sandwich a while ago. Normally, Lily just waited for me to finish and then we walked out together. Lily never stayed after I was done. She always called herself finished as well. Normally she would draw to occupy herself while I ignored her and picked at the bread.

So now I was staring at her. That's what I'd been reduced to. She was making me stare at her looking all mopey. This was ridiculous.

Eventually she looked up at me. I didn't bother looking away to save her feelings.