Joy

It is dark in here, and quiet. Too quiet. There are only the muffled whispers outside my door and the tranquil ticking of some far off clock, counting down the minutes. The minutes until morning. The minutes until I get out of here. The minutes until I die.

You think about death a lot in a place like this. But you’re not supposed to. That’s a big no-no. You either ignore it, the nagging reminder with every tick of the clock and every heartbeat that you are now one second closer to your death, or you take care of it yourself.

Tick. One more second. Tock. Another. Tick. Death. Tock. Please. Tick. No. Tock. Suffer.

You’re not supposed to think about death, even when the clock is screaming at you about it. You’re not supposed to think about dying or pills or guns or sharp objects. You’re supposed to think about rainbows. You’re supposed to think about a field with a creek and flowers and an old, sturdy oak tree. You’re not supposed to think about drowning yourself in the creek or hanging yourself from the tree. Just go to your happy place. Just let the drugs take you there. I don’t take the drugs. I don’t take the drugs and I think about dying because I’m not supposed to be here.

Here, when you’re taking your drugs and not thinking about death, you’re supposed to talk about your mother. You’re supposed to talk about where it all went wrong. The turning point. The downward spiral.

I talk about the pictures. I talk about the colors and the shapes and how I could show them if they just gave me some pencils. No pencils. No sharp objects. No. It’s always no.

I talk about how much I miss my room and my cat and my mother. My mother who brought me here to be poked and prodded and analyzed for my own good. My own good? I hate it when people say that. No one ever does anything for anyone else’s own good. But that’s what they always say.

I am not in here for my own good. I am in here because I scare people. People are always scared of what they don’t understand. They don’t understand me because I’m not like them. I don’t wear pink and listen to popular music. I don’t swoon over jocks and movie stars. I don’t stick my finger down my throat to fit into size zero jeans and I’ve never gotten on my knees for a necklace or an A. And they’re the normal ones.

The clock is deafening now. Tick tock. Impending doom. Tick tock. Never again. Tick – The heartbeat rhythm is disrupted by the sound of soft white tennis shoes coming to a halt outside my door. I stare at the ceiling. I don’t want to talk now. The nurse flips on the light. I count the ceiling tiles. I don’t want to talk now.

“Joy, we can’t have you sitting here in the dark. Get up. Dr. Willis wants to see you.”

I turn to face the wall.

“I want to call my mother.”

“Talk to the doctor about it,” she says coldly. “Are you going to come or do I need to call someone?”

Someone was a big, burly orderly and a syringe containing a near-overdose of some sedative or another. I stuff my feet into the flimsy slippers next to the unforgiving metal-framed bed. My hand brushes the restraints hanging from the side of the bed. An involuntary shudder makes my shoulders shake as I remember my first hours here.

She didn’t tell me where we were going or what was happening. She brought me straight from school. They were waiting when we pulled up. She didn’t even come inside with me or say goodbye.

“It’s for your own good, Joy. You’ll see,” she said. Dr. Willis with his white coat and over-groomed moustache opened the door and took my hand, gently pulling me out of car with his cold, firm grip.

“Mom, please,” I begged, my eyes wide and filled with terrified, hopeless tears. She didn’t meet my gaze, but rather stared at her own hands. Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, but she did not cry. She shook her head over and over while the doctor took me away, but she didn’t cry, even when I called out to her.

“Stop, please, don’t!” I cried. “Mom, please. Mommy! I’m not crazy. Don’t do this to me! I’m not crazy!”

They needed the restraints because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t banish image of my mother, shaking her head and ignoring my cries for help, from my head. I think I cried more than I ever have in my life that afternoon. They put the restraints on because in that cold, dull room, knees drawn to my chest and eyes painfully red and swollen, I started clawing at my legs, leaving long, angry marks where my nails scraped the flesh. I don’t remember very much after that.

“I’m not crazy,” I insist for the hundredth time. In the calm stillness of Dr. Willis’ office, I trace the pattern on the sofa with a shaking finger.

“No, you’re not,” the doctor replies thoughtfully. He draws himself up in his important leather chair and rests his elbows on the dark maple desk. He picks up a familiar purple notebook.

Geometry is my least favorite class. Time moves painfully slow while I’m in there, and the inane chatter of my most hated peers makes me want to scream. The teacher doesn’t care if we pass or fail. I don’t take notes. I draw.

“What’s that?” Holly Creswell sneered, jabbing her pencil at my notebook. I looked down. A pair of watering charcoal eyes stared up at me.

“It’s just a picture,” I muttered, hastily closing the notebook. Holly flipped her long blonde hair over her shoulder and rolled her eyes.

“Looks pretty emo to me,” she observed, disapproval and venom dripping from her tongue. I wonder how she’s look with that long hair forming a noose around her alabaster neck. “What are you, like, suicidal or something?”

"Hardly," I snapped. "Not like you'd give a damn if I was."

Holly's crystal blue eyes suddenly grew very wide. She looked almost childlike. Almost innocent. Almost.

"You're not seriously thinking about killing yourself," Holly hissed, "are you? That would be so lame."

I shrugged.

"I hear they give you a full page in the yearbook. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal."

My attempt at humor fell flat and Holly's eyes grew wider still.

"You shouldn't talk about that," she scolded. "Someone might think you're serious or something."

"You aren't crazy, Joy," Dr. Willis says slowly, but these things you've drawn, these things you've written, they concern me."

They concern me. They concern him like they concerned Holly Creswell and the school counselor. They concern him because they indicate that I am not the normal, happy, brainless teenager he wants me to be. They concern him because now I'm his mess to clean up, and if I off myself, he could be in for a nasty lawsuit.

"Why?" I demand yet again. That seems to be a question that no one around here likes to answer. "I get good grades, I have friends. I don't cut myself or cry for no reason. These drawings, these poems, they just come out of nowhere!"

I clench my fists and grit my teeth, waiting for this old anger to subside. I'm never good enough as I am; people are always trying to change me.

I glance at a stone bust of someone important. I imagine it on the floor, in a million sharp, jagged pieces.

Dr. Willis eyes the figure, and then me.
"Are we going to have a problem?" He asks, eyebrow raised and finger poised on the security button under the desk.

"No," I say, suddenly very calm, "no problem."

"You're clearly very angry, Joy," he observes, leaning tensely back in his chair. I am rigid on the sofa, staring at my hands.

"Why do you think that is?" I ask through gritted teeth.

"I believe that you were wronged," he says. He's being vague. He wants me to fill in the blanks.

"Wronged how?"

"I don't know, Joy. But I think that, whatever happened, you never confronted your feelings about it. And because of that, they are resurfacing in your imagination as these drawings and poems."

I could see it through Dr. Willis' eyes. I am four years old. I'm at the park. It’s a beautiful day. The sky is bright blue and cloudless. There are wildflowers growing in colorful bunches near the woods. My mother, busy scolding my brother for bullying me, doesn't notice when I fall behind to make myself a bouquet.

No one sees me disappear into the trees. No one notices I’m missing until I emerge, tears streaming down my face, the cause of my anguish escaping in the other direction with a baseball cap low over his eyes and my innocence on his rough, cruel hands.

If only.

"I was six," I start, my voice shaking as I begin to remember everything.

The late afternoon sun was turning the horizon a dark, passionate pink. I gazed out the window, wishing I had something better to do.

Mom and Dad were too busy to play with me, and Jackie had better things to do. She was sixteen, after all. What sixteen year old wants to spend their time entertaining their kid sister?

The sky was blood red when I heard the music. It wasn’t loud, but it was repetitive. I listened to the song three times before going upstairs to investigate.

The music was coming from Jackie’s room. I banged on the door with my tiny fists. I knew she would be mad at me, but I was bored and growing irritable. I just wanted to stop hearing that song.

With a long creak, the door came open. My hands flew to my mouth when I beheld the sight within.

There was my sister, auburn hair a mess around her shoulders and body limp and cold, dead, hanging by a coarse rope in her closet.

Eyes wide, I took in the sight of her. Her green eyes, once vibrant, were dim, her eyelids half closed. In her hand she clutched our grandmother’s rosary, her pale white skin an incredible contrast to the dark metal and red glass beads.

Without a breath or sound, I turned on my heel and closed the door behind me. I padded down the hall to my own bedroom and hid beneath the covers, forbidding my tears to fall.

I pretended not to hear my mother’s tortured scream when she sound Jackie’s body, or the wail of the sirens coming down the street. And when my father found me, feigning sleep beneath my sheets, he muttered his bittersweet relief.

“Heaven help me,” he sighed deeply, “my beautiful, peaceful Joy. At least you didn’t see.”

“I’m not crazy,” I whisper for the last time.

“No, Joy,” Dr. Willis replies, “you certainly are not.”

It is quiet now. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the ticking of an impatient clock, counting down the seconds. The seconds until nightfall. The seconds until my release. The seconds until my recovery. The seconds until it all comes falling down. The seconds until I die.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Bliss.