over·step · infirmary · aj ·
Silence. Not a peaceful silence. Not the freeing silence that I needed, laced with the clarity and the focus that a high gave me, but a broken silence. The one that reveals itself after a potential becomes evident and recognized and you are left to admit your fault with an unsatisfactory “Oh.” It’s silence that you feel with your bones rather than hearing. And even though you hear nothing you can feel its unspoken truth: You are alone and no ones cares an ounce. Oh.
There’s also weakness, a lingering exhaustion from the convulsions of my seizure and the destruction of what she pumped me with. I never over used. Why did I overuse that time? It didn’t add up. Nothing added up. My nightmares and day time hauntings were enough. I just wanted to breath. Mentally. Now I couldn’t breath and Acaria was no where to be found.
I slept for hours in that white room stuck in a loop between reality and a nightmare. I couldn’t tell where the trip ended and the terrors began. I couldn’t tell if the white room was part of the delusions or what little coherency I had. They brought me food that I couldn’t stomach. I slept some more.
A lady with black glasses and a clipboard came in when I was awake again. Fuck that clipboard. Why did it bother me. She told me about my mind, according to the many tests and scans they took of me while I was out. Apparently it had a lot of problems. I laughed. I laughed really hard.
She examined my body first. Lifted my gown just below my breasts and exam the skin there. She inspected my nails, my hair, and took notes.
We played ‘games’ after that. They seemed pointless but she seemed very intrigued. I matched pictures together. Sometimes they were simple shapes, other times abstract blobs and corners. Sometimes they were actual objects, words, symbols or full drawings. She had me look for patterns next, giving me weird lists consisting of symbols of some sort and ask me to identify which one would come next. She had me read, do things from memory, solve weird puzzles.
She watched me as I played with weird objects. A smooth spherical object that slipped and glided even in my hands. A cylindrical container that held blobs of an inky black blobs suspended in a clear liquid. That one was interesting.
Finally she interrogated me. The questions were basic at first. What was my name? Why was I here? Who was my family? How old was I? Do I have friends? Things they would know even without my telling because they are the Capitol. But they asked anyway. Maybe about of curtesy.
Then they got me-specific. How much sleep did I get? How often did I have nightmares? What was my earliest memory? How much did I sleep? What drugs did I use.?
Then they got personal. What was I afraid of? What did I love? What did I think about the world? The world? The world. Did I believe in a faith. Did I experience sexual attraction? Did I experience romantic attraction? What did I think about humanity?
Then they got. Weird. But only for one question. Because I couldn’t answer. What happened during the war.
Then I had to explain everything. The the threat of some ‘truth serum’ loomed over me if I failed to speak voluntarily.
Delusions, evident in the voices and my many coping methods, caused by a psychotic break that would further progress if untreated. Psychotic breaks, possibly caused by my obsessive compulsion to rethink my life over and over and over again and underlying condition that goes unidentified. Obsessive compulsive behavior cause by fear. Anxiety, expressed by a pyschogenic itch, my upper abdomen, caused by fear. Memory lapses and repressions to forget the fear. She explained it so simply. So easily. And it struck me in the face. I thought about the water, the dusk, the red, the polygraph, the chord, and the snow, all the fragments but never about what I couldn’t remember. Because I didn’t want to remember. And it was driving me crazy.
She filled me in by the way. I didn’t overuse, I didn’t overstep, kudos to me. Someone gave me more on purpose but I didn’t remember. Typical. But she said that I would. Soon.
Prescription mediation. Four of them. I couldn’t even pronounce their names. If I could I would have still been distracted by my new revelation: I did not know who or what I was. This me was not a real me. This me lived outside just on the border between reality and her mind. The me, high on drugs, was not a real me either. She might have been a me entirely inside my mind - just really good at shouting to the other side, into the real world. I had never experienced clarity and focus and normalcy without a high. I had never experienced the perfect middle. I had never been on the right side of the line.
I didn’t know if I wanted to.
