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.