I forget about Tumblr sometimes. But never about writing.
Both patients, upon receipt of week-long meal plan menus at intake, checkmarked egg-based breakfast items for the following morning and Swedish meatballs for that night’s dinner. The thief’s daughter, who received her meatballs in Unit 1’s dining room under unremarkable circumstances, was predictably unable to eat her food. The ex-convict ex-Marine had not fared any better. He received his meal tray in the intake interview room a short time after intake nurse Sam—who is the sort of girl that the ex-convict ex-Marine, in better circumstances and cleaner clothes, would normally find himself compelled to flirt with—concluded her interview by asking him to recall the last time or thing that he ate.
“Alright. One more question for you, Mr. Scarpacci. What did you have to eat today?”
He thought for a long time. He found himself painfully aware of how long this took him—painfully aware of his muddled thinking, of his cognitive slowing. This, like every other vulnerable, revealing admission he’d been forced to make to the highly attractive yet highly clinical intake nurse Sam, pained and embarrassed him. He had by this point told intake nurse Sam of how much he wanted to die and how often he’d thought of it, of how at first it had crept into his mind at low points in the week, perhaps just a fleeting thought on the drive home after a terrible day or while reflecting on some future work task he dreaded, “I could always just kill myself,” and how it had initially presented as a relaxing little nothing, a thing to say to himself, an imagined route of escape down which no one and no annoyance and no stress and nothing at all could follow him, an innocent fantasy, therapeutic even, especially when he imagined the feelings and conversations of the bewildered people he'd leave behind, people who thought he seemed so carefree, and how this once relaxing thought had at some point thereafter fully entered and possessed him, how it had become the only thought he had, how life had become relentless blistering cold, how suicide was a warmth to which he was drawn, a warmth he longed for but which he didn’t have the courage to reach, how it had eclipsed even the warmth of cocaine, alcohol, sex, how it had become the only warmth in his life, the only possibility. He told her how many times he’d tried to die. This admission, which had made him cry in front of her, was the most embarrassing of all. Several times, he’d realized aloud, had been passive attempts. Small things like walking into traffic and hoping a car might hit him. He regretted telling her these things. He regretted coming here. And here his mind fled reality and refocused instead on the diminishing prospects of successful sexual pursuit of intake nurse Sam, which—if they had not already been such the entire time—had surely slimmed to nothing. And with this thought came also the thought of the woman he had spent the past several months risking contraction of venereal disease to forget: his soon to be ex-wife.
And so he fled these winding caves of his mind and returned to the present. He returned to intake nurse Sam’s question. What did he have to eat today? He searched for a meal, a snack, a single crumb across the gray, fading, waterlogged pages of his memory, blurred beyond recognition by alcohol. Unfamiliar face upon unfamiliar face consumed upon unfamiliar bed, accompanied by all manner of drugs—some current companions, some old forgotten friends (he’d managed to come into possession of a few tabs of Dexedrine), and some new acquaintances. His memories of this morning blurred into last night, which blurred into last morning and so on. He remembered the cliff, he remembered the officers, he remembered jail, he remembered vomiting. He recalled no regurgitated traces of food, no familiar colors, no identifiable tastes; only alcohol and bile.
He thought and then he said, “I don't know.”
“No breakfast? No snacks?”
She wrote something on her pad.
“What's the last food you can remember eating?”
“I think I had some Cheerios... a while ago.”
“Was that today or yesterday?”
“How long do you think it’s been since you ate?”
“I’d like to get your weight and your vitals.”
Intake nurse Sam was none too pleased with the results. He questioned the accuracy of her scale, which placed him nearly twenty pounds shy of his normal range. Though, admittedly, he’d been notching his belt tighter than usual the past couple of months, and though admittedly several friends and family members had told him he was looking sunken and tired, he said he’d attributed this to the cessation of his workout routine (what he called PT) and the loss of muscle mass.
