"My name is Jason. I've been here two and a half years. I don't care about people. Love isn't real. If any of you were choking in the hallway, thrashing around on the ground like a fish out of water," I look at the people sitting around for a more dramatic effect, "I'd just step over you and not look back when you stop moving." I look down at the ground when my eyes pass over Grit and Candice. I lock eyes with the nurses and doctors who are taking notes on whatever I say or do.
It's group therapy. We have it three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I have no Idea why they picked those days. These are are usually the days I look a little more longingly to any means of escape, like hanging, overdose, or the classic plastic bag over my head like the stories you hear of babies who asphyxiate themselves when Mommy is unloading groceries.
To tell you the truth, I wasn't this morbid when I got here.
To tell you the truth, I smiled a lot before I walked into this cage.
To tell you the truth, I'm forgetting what it's like to be happy.
In prison they give you jobs to do like make brooms or answer phones. Here there is a "peer counseling" program. It's mandatory for most people here.
They won't let me join in anymore. I always tell the person spilling his guts out to me that he should just pull the trigger, kick out the chair, or choke down too many pills. I'm always telling him it hurts a lot to die, but it hurts a lot more to live.
And when it's my turn to share about my life, I usually say I have no future. I say that I don't care. I say, I plan on dying soon anyway, so what's the point?
That's usually about the time I stop talking because if I say anything else it might be obvious I'm trying to hold back tears.
What I really want to say is, "Why am I here? Where are my parents? Why don't they visit me? Am I really that bad? What did I do? Would they accept my apology?"
Boo Boo is my peer counselor, I guess. But the question that I wouldn't even ever ask him is "Didn't my parents love me?"
All these people need to know is that I don't care. All these people need to know is that I'm a rock and I don't feel anything. I'm not soft on the inside. I'm solid all the way through. That's all they need to know.
All these people need to know is that I do drugs because I'm bored, not because I don't want to feel anything anymore. These people don't need to know that every morning I flip my pillow over so that no one can see the puddle I cried onto my pillow during the night.
There's nothing wrong with me I can't fix myself, I just keep saying that to myself. There's nothing wrong with me I can't fix myself.
There's nothing wrong with me. Period.... I can't fix myself. Period. When I say it to myself like that it's a paradox, but it makes a whole lot more sense. There's nothing wrong with me. I can't fix myself.
The rest of these hopeless cases start to talk about themselves in this group therapy thing. I don't listen. I used to listen to Grit and Candice. Now I just make eye contact with them and pretend like I'm listening. I don't believe in love, but I guess I care about them. I just don't want to bring them down with me. The farther I keep them from myself the safer they'll be.
Soon I've had enough of these people complaining about their lives. So I start to laugh out loud.
To tell you the truth, nothing is funny, I just have to smile and close my eyes and try my hardest to think back to when I lived with my family. I have to try my hardest to think of watching cartoons in my parents bed, try my hardest to be happy so that I can laugh.
Because when some one is opening themselves up to a group of strangers, the worst thing imaginable is some one laughing.
Think about it. Your in a circle of strangers and you're telling everyone about your mom, how she never loved you. Or how your dad made you keep his secret about how and where he touched you, and some one starts to laugh. Your talking about how your boyfriend is putting his penis in places and people it doesn't belong, and you hear a giggle from somewhere across from you.
I don't like doing it but it's the only way that I can get out of there. As soon as I close my eyes and smile, the nurses know what comes next. They walk over to me and pick me up and drag me out of the room laughing like moron. Laughing like an idiot. Laughing like someone who belongs in an asylum.
They put me in my room and I bury my head in my pillow again and let my face leak. I let my tears fall and nose run. I don't let my shoulders heave. God forbid anyone see me with any emotion more than lust.
Lust for drugs. Lust for sex. Lust for... what ever I can get my hands on.
I cry all over that pillow. I think of babies screaming for their moms. I think of planes crashing or dogs dying. I think of the girls who find the perfect dress for the dance that they've waited their whole lives for, and when they put it on the zipper doesn't go all the way up the back even though they starved themselves for weeks.
I let myself cry.
It's like beating a stranger so you don't hit your friends. It's like killing yourself so you don't bring a gun to work or school and blow off people's heads.
Each tear is a little emotion slipping out. I try my hardest to cry when I'm alone because I don't let the waterworks flow when I'm in sight of people.
I cry my hardest now so that a tear never leaves my eye when I'm sitting alone in lunch.
I cry now because it's all I know how to do.
When I hear people start to fill up the hallway, I breathe in a deep breath and turn over my pillow, which is still damp from the tears of the night before.
