Princess Interrupted Part II

But this isn’t a story about love, nor is it a story about loss.

“Fernando's not coming”

The nurse states, closing the door to the observation room behind her. She’s matter of fact, cold even. Mid-50s with curly, strawberry blonde hair, I can tell her patience towards me is wearing thin. I’ve been in the hospital for what must be days at this point, but I lost all sense of time ages ago. Making my way into this dungeon of a room was even an upgrade from the purgatory of the waiting room.

“He’s in Los Angeles,” she added,  “He also said you two haven’t spoken in years.”

“That’s not true,” I start to say, but my words trail off into a whisper. Ok, it’s kind of true if you don’t count the telepathy. I look around my metal cage and realize from her words and tone that shit is about to get so incredibly real. I start to express to her how I feel like a butterfly trapped in a habitat but stop myself as the scratching of her pen on the paper signifies wrongdoing. Noteworthy equals punishable, I think to myself. 

I begin to contemplate the idea the irony of my biggest right being the one to remain silent.

“Can you give me a piece of pen and paper?” I say, thinking fast.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she inconclusively provides, not even attempting to hide her disdain, opening and closing the same door to the secret observation room I will never be allowed to enter.

She reemerges, this time with a pencil and paper. 

I scribble the note as fast as I can

Fernando,

It is your totally awesome hot normal insane insanely hot ex-girlfriend. I need a translator to get me out of here. I feel like it’s my first day of preschool and everyone is speaking English, but I am speaking Spanish. I need your help.

“Here—can you try to call Fernando back and read him this?” I motion towards the note.

She takes one look at it, and looks up at me. “We’re really going to need another emergency contact, but I’ll see what I can do.” 

She never called him, at least that’s what I said to soothe myself after the fact.

She comes back into the room after another 20 minutes or so, and it becomes apparent my desperate attempts to telepathically persuade Fernando to pick up the phone aren’t going to work. I don’t dare trying to call or text him on my own cell phone, even though it’s been sitting with me this entire time. Even pulling up his name in my phone doesn’t feel right. It wouldn’t work, and the secondhand rejection feels like all I can bear in this moment.  

“Ok, I can call my Dad” I say, defeated, knowing that is not going to go down well. That’s what the sane thing would have been to do from the start. But where is the sanity in a truly insane situation? My high begins to subside as reality rears it’s ugly head, the depression and anxiety coming back to say “I told you he didn’t really love you.”

I glance around the room one last time before sealing in my fate, and making a call that will irrevocably change the way I am perceived by my entire family, which will soon enough, taint the way I view myself. My actions over the course of the past few months will all be called into question, and I will have no logic to defend myself. In this moment, faith becomes foolishness. Manifestation becomes psychosis. All the actions taken in love, misconstrued and used as supporting evidence for mental illness. But I don’t know any of that yet.

There is a TV with a one-way mirror on one wall, a metal garage door on another and a locked door on the other, only opened when I am escorted by 2 nurses when I get permission to use the bathroom. I made the mistake of peeing into an old orange juice container before I realized I was allowed to ask for permission to leave. It shocked me at how normal the nurse perceived this behavior, but how off the wall my ideas and concepts sounded.

I search for my phone, and find it twisted in the hospital bedsheets. I was making a conscious effort not to look or even think about the outside world, and as it stands right now, nothing has changed. I pull up my Dad’s phone number and press call, breaking the glass of my reality forever. Let the games begin.

“Somewhere between psychotic and iconic

Somewhere between I want it and I got it

Somewhere between I’m sober and I’m lifted

Somewhere between a mistress and commitment.”

 - Drake, Furthest Thing