"Love yourself"

I had a session today.

I went into Paul's office and looked across the desk at him. His beard was a few days too short and his hair was a day too late in need of washing. He wiped his nose with the heel of his hand before sorting out his paperwork. I crossed my legs in the chair bowed from years of fat arses.

- So, Dylan, I see that you've tried hypnotherapy in the past.
- To help me quit smoking.
- I see... and was it successful?
- Paul, I smoke six packs a week. What do you think?
- Ok, so no progress there. Have you tried some positive affirmation?
- No, and I'll be honest, it already sounds like absolute bullshit.

To his credit, he laughed at that. That was something.

- Just give it a try, Dylan. It can't hurt. It might help.

I rolled my eyes. I took a piece of paper off his desk and started to rip off little squares.

- I'd rather you didn't do that.

I didn't look up at him. I know the rules. Therapists aren't allowed to touch us. He can ask me nicely, but as he's told me SO many times, this is a Safe Space. He can't make me do anything that I don't want to. So I didn't stop. He huffed a little and straightened up the paperwork that was still in front of him. It was a very small victory but I was still glad of it. I rolled the squares into pellets and began trying to flick them at the edge of the desk.

- Ok, Dylan, I think we've made as much progress as we're going to, I can see that you're not paying attention.
- What was your first clue, doctor?
- Dylan... I want you to go back to your room, look at me Dylan,

I obliged.

- I want you to go back to your room, and every morning and every evening look at yourself in the mirror and I want you to say this:

You are loved. You are wanted. You are needed. I want you to get better.

Can you do that for me, Dylan?

- Surely, doctor, I'm doing it for ME.
- Whatever your reasons. Do you remember...
- Yeah, yeah, lovey, wanting, needy, getting better, blah, blah, blah. I'm going.

Suddenly his "open door" policy made sense. There are just some days where I can't be bothered to humour him. I got out of the cavernous seat and made my way towards the door, placing my fingertips in the handle.

- What about our next session, Miss Leigh?

I drew my hand away and walked back to his desk. I picked up a pile of papers and threw them into the air.

- Next time, I'll inhale the planet.

I told him. And then I left. I don't know why I did it, and I don't know why I said it. But, for what it's worth, I was blisteringly happy that I did.

When I got back to my room someone had made my bed for me. That always felt so bloody ironic. They hammered that metaphor home far too heavily. A tiny piece of order in a place where every mind was falling to pieces. I went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror.

- You are loved. You are wanted. You are needed. I want you to get better.

The words felt like ash on my tongue. Soft. Dry. Disgusting. Out of nowhere, bile rose in my throat and I bend over the sink to vomit. Well, I won't be eating the chicken kiev again in a hurry.

Today I wanted to be sick almost constantly.

I sat in Clara's room for a few hours while she curled up in a quiet ball, shivering from the cold  on her bones.

- I hate Logan for what he's done to me.
I said this while picking lint balls off the blanket she was hiding under and flicking them under the opposite bed.
- I hate him too. I want to punch him in the face.
- I didn't want to be in love with him, but I feel like my innards are external whenever I think of him. I feel like a kangaroo with a sea urchin in its pouch, like I'm being poisoned from the inside out.
- Literally, Dylan, if I ever meet him I'll properly punch him in his face.

I laughed at that. Clara is ferocious like a tigress, but quiet as a mouse. She wears her rage as a mask of determination. She's like an origami bird - beautiful. Angular.

- Please, do beat him up if you get the chance.
- I will. He's too much of a pussy to beat up a girl anyway.
- True. It's frustrating because he never did anything wrong before we started to break up, but then became this total ogre. I don't get it.
- He clearly realised he wasn't good enough for you and that made him angry.

I laughed again, for a long, long time.

Secretly, though I wanted to agree with this, I had never felt good enough for him. I never feel good enough full stop. That's part of me. I have an integral, innate sense of insufficiency. When I gain weight I feel sick, like I want to take a scalpel to my body and slice of anything that isn't vital to live. When I lose it, I think that there's so long to go that I get overwhelmed. And, sadly, my weight isn't even the worst of my problems.

Ketch is out again. They let him out every now and then, but he's always back within the week. It just doesn't work on the outside for him. Within hours of release he's trying to get back in here again. I don't flatter myself in thinking that it's anything to do with me. He could find sex in a monastery. Actually... sometimes, from what I've heard, sex seems to find him. I'd admire it if it didn't make me so horribly insecure.

Adele has taken to staring through my window. It's annoying. I asked her why once and she said that she'd decided to be my Guardian Angel. That is doubly annoying. Maybe it's nice that she wants to watch over me, but it's frankly a little ridiculous considering that so far the other celestial pigeons have seen fit only to bless me with their cosmic shittings.
I once heard that Ketch's nurse tried to give him a antihistamine shot but he backhanded her, grabbed the needle and stuck it through his own tongue. I'm sure that's not true. Someone told me that he taught Katie Burroughs to make a bong out of a coke can and a water bottle and then tried to shank her. I don't think that's true either. I heard, while eavesdropping on the anorexics, that he is fucking his therapist. I really hope that isn't true.
I had an appointment with Paul today. He's my doctor. He is very, very green and I don't like him much. He only got the position because the old one got stabbed through the eye with a pair of surgical scissors by one of the sociopaths. It's still not entirely certain how they got their hands on the scissors, but after the guy impaled Dr. Campbell he tried to cut off his own ear. This is a weird place.
- Good morning, Dylan.
- Morning, Paul.
I sat down in the chair opposite him, his desk between us. The chair is a deep maroon leather, seriously concave in the seat from being in this office too long, and dull and worn down on the arm rest. The wood was slightly splintered. As I scraped my fingernails over the barely-there polish I figured out why.
- How are you feeling today, Dylan?
- Fidgety. I have a headache. I would like my phone back.
- You know why you've lost telephone privileges, Dylan.
- Calling that triage nurse a chubby bitch was just honest. She knows it, so does everyone else. I didn't mention her shocking body odour or thatchy moustache.
- Dylan...
- It might have been rude but come on, having her work on a ward full of starving women is not going to help, is it? She's not exactly a shining example of a curvy but beautiful woman. She's a troll. She should live under a bridge.
- Dylan!
- And she talks too much. She makes me sick.
- DYLAN!
- Yes?
- You're not helping your case here.
- I think it's ironic that you spend all of your time teaching pathological liars to tell the truth, but when I do, I get punished.
He went quiet, which satisfied me. As I said, green as fucking cabbage, that man.

Men, men, men, men, manly men, men, men...

It's not exactly easy to explain my history with partners. Before I came here I liked to sleep with men and women if I was lonely, sometimes over a period of time, sometimes only once. Until I was sixteen I could count on one hand and name every person I'd ever kissed. Now I'm not entirely sure whether that figure is in the double, triple or quadruple figures. Part of me hopes that it's under 100, but there's really no way of knowing. Clubbing was always a strange experience for me. I always felt fatter, uglier, taller than all of the other girls. Dancing felt awkward, I never new what to do with my feet or arms, I tended to drink too much too quickly and flag towards the middle of the night, not the end. To save myself the awkwardness and embarrassment I would always migrate towards the smoking area. There I could chain smoke and talk to strangers, sometimes kiss them, sometimes laugh at how chavvy they were and make my way back indoors to fight off the shivers that grew out of the nicotine rush and the cold. I would find a sofa by myself while my friends danced "ironically" to shitty chart music and sit in the most flattering position I could.
The first guy I slept with was a thorough cliché - by which I mean disappointing. He was a volunteer archaeologist with a posh accent and boobs bigger than mine. It happened in a crappy house full of fresh graduates and postcards in frames of sail boats and lighthouses. We started to kiss on a white leather sofa, and he was frustrated by my ankle-length dress and that fact that it was hard for him to get his hand under it. I didn't really want to have sex with him, but he was keen and I got tired of saying no, so I said, "Ok, but make it quick?" I never saw him after that day. There were a few irrelevant "incidents" in between who I would prefer to forget, like the one I went to school with and the guy in the back of the taxi.
I've had two meaningful sexual relationships. One was with a boyfriend who I like to think I was in love with. I certainly believed that I was at the time. We were together for 6 or so months before it all went wrong, for reasons that are still unclear to me. The sex was comforting. That's the best way to describe it. He was chubby and tall and hairy, and I guess it was kind of like fucking an erect, erotic teddy bear. We'd been together for a while and screwing longer before we first had any kind of tender emotional sex. It was pretty intense. For a while you could factor in three fucks per overnight stay. Then only the night I arrived. then the morning I left. Then we didn't see each other any more.
And then there was Ketch. There is Ketch. There will always be Ketch.
I will never understand why literature tells the lies that it tells... about love, sex, happiness... It lies about all of the "good" and "beautiful" things. And why? Describing sex isn't, and shouldn't be, like describing a unicorn. I could describe it in intricate, intimate, exacting detail but what would be the point, exactly? If you've never had sex you won't really understand it properly, and if you're not then you know how it works. Ketch and I aren't freaky in the sack. Neither of us is extraordinarily kinky. In fact, I think when it comes down it it, the sex is probably the most normal thing about us both. I'm not writing our love story and this isn't an erotic novel. There's no point or merit in explicitly writing about the way we fucked. There is, however, something very wrong with the thought of not mentioning it at all.
It is generally quite unemotional. It is almost always impersonal. More often than not we don't say anything to each other except, perhaps, "My hip, shit, my hip is cramping up," or, "Yeah, this isn't working, flip over." It is very rarely intimate. By that I mean never. Never except for once. And holy hell was that a huge mistake.
Sex, in its typical undignified way, is generally "sexier" in your head. For me, in reality, it's always felt a little strange and foreign. Not in an entirely bad way, only once have I had sex that I would actually call "bad". I can most simply liken it to travelling. It's weird and unfamiliar, slightly awkward, and sometimes stuff happens that you can't control or understand but none of this is in a way that we hate and besides, we bought the ticket in the first place so we get what we were asking for, really. A lot of people would argue that for a person so evidently obsessed with sex I'm a bit reluctant to get coarse. To them I say have some sex of your own, and you will realise why writing about it is so unerotic.
Having said all of this, the way we met, Ketch and I, was instantly sexual. It was maybe my third or fourth day on corridor pass, and I was on my way to the swimming pool. I heard someone say,
- You look bored. Come with me.
Fingers closed around my wrist so tight that they might snap and pulled me backwards into a cupboard, closing the door before I could see the perpetrator. He trapped me between his body and a shelf and he kissed me. I kissed him back. We both fumbled with our clothes and it just happened. We were sober. It was the middle of the day. We didn't know each other's names. I hadn't even seen his face. When it was over we wrestled our clothes back into place and fell back into the corridor, short of breath and damp with sweat. I saw him for the first time. He was scruffy, very skinny, though I'd felt that before when our hips ground together. He wasn't very tall, and he was pale except for a faint splatter of freckles over his shoulders.
- I'm Ketch.
- Dylan.
- I don't do that very often.
- I do.
- I'll see you around, then.
- I'll see you when I see you.
I've only slept in his bed a handful of times, when we're both too tired to move, my head on his hollow, hard chest. It’s fascinating, somehow, that I can hear the beat of a heart that I’m sure is kept in a drawer of a filing cabinet somewhere far, far away. Why is it that I am so achingly aware of the rhythm of the part of a man where I’m so unwelcome? He’ll have me in his bed, he’ll have me in his arms and he’ll have me however he wants when the mood takes him but he will not love me. He says that it’s not in his code but we both know that it’s bullshit. It is total bollocks. We don’t really talk about his life before we were here. I am not his therapy. Or maybe I am. I’m not going to be his personal therapist, though. I’m not going to ask him questions about his past or his parents or his relationship with his penis. It’s nothing to do with me. Regardless, I’d like to know what it really is that makes him turn the light off. I want to know why he never wants to look at my face or my body or let me see him once his clothes had come off. I’d never even seen the skin of his arms any further up than the bump of the bone in his wrist. I’ve owned a man’s heart before. For years it thrummed alongside mine like two beetles in a matchbox. You could ask what I didn't mention this man when I talked about my sexual partners. That's because this man cared for me so deeply, so intimately, so desperately that he refused to take my virginity for fear of hurting or damaging me. If he had known that my first sexual act had been the result of a sexual attack and that my innocence was lost on a foam mattress without sheets he might have locked me to his side. I wouldn't have minded. And I probably wouldn't be here.

My name is Dylan.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when I screw up. Even much later it’s impossibly difficult to put my finger on the exact string that unravelled. I always start places with the brightest prospects but somehow the persona becomes unknotted and it’s never easy to look to the future when your mask is slipping into a blindfold.

My name is Dylan, and I live in a "facility". This is all meant to be part of my therapy. Names do not remain the same, not of places or people. Not mine, not theirs.

I know when I first started losing a grip on this particular happy girl that everyone else was content to see. It was in morning chapel and I could see a face. Not in the conventional place, on someone’s head, but in a chair. It was sticking its tongue out at me, pretending to be innocent. The smile on my face slipped. I tried to put it back on but the chair just kept watching me. There are lots of faces out there, really, though not where maybe you might expect to see them.

My mornings have had the same pattern for quite some time now.

-Name?

- Dylan Lucy Leigh.

- And where are you now, Dylan, can you tell me?

- Deacon Grange.

- Good, good, and why are you here, Dylan?

- Ask my doctor because I don’t remember.

- Alright, I‘ll see you this evening.

That’s been the first exchange of the day, every day for one year, four months and six days.

Up until my twenty-first birthday the longest that I’d ever spent in hospital was three weeks when I was seven because I stopped breathing. I don’t remember much, only that the blood tests hurt and that the girl in the bed next to me with the broken hip talked in her sleep and that on my first night I woke up to see my dad staring bleary eyed at me. It made me jump. That was a long time ago and where I am now I’ve had so many injections I no longer notice them, one in three girls talks in her sleep and there are plenty of shadows that jump out at you every night for one year, four months and six days.

And, by the way, it’s true. I don’t remember.

That’s why I live on Memory Lane, or at least that’s what we all call it. There are at least thirty of us at any one time. There are the ones who can remember most things, how to eat, how to behave, how to speak but they can’t remember their own names. They forget themselves. We call them Forget-me-nots, like the flower. Maybe it’s cruel but it’s what we’ve always called them. There are also girls who forget absolutely everything, and I mean everything, how to talk straight, how to walk. They are like big grown up babies. They cry a lot and sooner or later the nurses will decide that they are “beyond rehabilitation”, in other words that they aren’t fixable. I don’t know what happens to them once that’s decided, but I suspect it’s a life full of sedateness and sedatives.

Then there are the girls like me, who remember some things clear as a bell and remember some things not at all. And some things I remember are wrong, but that’s not my fault.

There are four other girls like me. I don’t mean exactly like me, but like me in as much as they remember some things clearer that they knew them when they actually happened and have forgotten some things entirely:

Adele remembers standing on the roof of her school gym but she doesn’t remember jumping and she doesn’t remember why.

Gillian remembers dancing in a dark room with her boyfriend but doesn’t remember how they ended up in the ditch with his head splintered away from his shoulders and the engine on fire.

Jane remembers her wedding day and everything that led up to it, but she can’t remember her children’s faces, in fact she swears blind that they aren't hers even though she has the stretch marks to prove it.

Stella remembers the words to every song Duran Duran ever released and the “proper” way to eat soup. Beyond that she doesn’t really remember much.

Meanwhile I’m pretty sure I remember everything. It’s the doctors who aren’t convinced. I can’t always entirely decide upon whether or not I’m glad I’m the most normal in the room, or if I’m not annoyed that I’m not at the top of the heap; if I’m going to be a crazy I want to bring my A-game, surely? This is theoretically the one place in the world where I can literally do whatever I want, whether I want to scream, cry, kick people or shit myself indiscriminately. I’m the youngest in the room, but you can’t really tell; most of the women here seem 30 going on 13. I have been told my mental age is around 35. I’m more inclined to believe that the average woman in her twenties has a brain made of approximately seventeen over-used make up sponges. But that’s enough maths for the time being, I think. I never was one for sums and geometry, Besides, I think there might be a narrative in here somewhere.

I don’t want to be here. That much is abundantly clear. I don’t belong with the dreamers or the screamers or the pathological liars or the murderers or the simply fucking hopeless. I often wonder if my crime is pessimism, or maybe realism, or the inability to sugar-coat the painfully obvious. Maybe my problem is a stubborn refusal to lie. My hamartia, my Shakespearian tragic flaw, was a chronic dedication to face-value. I never could fake anything. Not a smile, not interest, not an orgasm. Some call it honesty. I call it despondency. A total lack of self-preservation. It wasn’t a conscious decision, as far as I recall. From my memory, I was always the kid who would, when confronted, confess to having stolen the cookies from the cookie jar. All indiscretions, every pilfered petty sundry, every piece of homework not completed was duly confessed to.

My father always told me, “There are two rules of integrity: Don’t do anything you shouldn’t, and if you do don’t get caught. If that is really how integrity is measured, I am not a very good person.

I suppose I should probably decide what genre it is I’m trying to write. I don’t know whether I’m trying to be Plath or Kaysen or just writing an autobiography where I just happen to be incarcerated in a loony bin. I do know that this isn’t a love story. Granted, I got laid a lot in the time period I’m writing about and I’m pretty sure that will come up, but… well, you can go ahead and decide all for yourself whether or not that particular sub-plot is a love story or just a gratuitous retrospective on a phase of my sex life. Whatever you read, I’m not WRITING a love story. Oh, and it’s not sci-fi. Definitely not sci-fi. I fucking hate sci-fi.

I will use this word only once because it makes me want to vomit, but this blog is all about my "journey". All I will promise is the truth.

Yours, 

Dylan.