I don’t know what I’m doing here. Bad. No, no. This is a small place. I am scared of these small places. All I want is to sleep in a warm place, then wake up and smile at pretty things. Pretty…
* * *
I am curled up in what they call fetal position. I feel like a baby, defenseless. My neck hurts when I move it or touch it, so that amuses me until my stomach remembers that it is supposed to be confused like me and starts pushing food out instead of pulling it in. There is a hard shiny bit of metal on my finger and it is crusted with what was in my confused stomach. Somehow that makes me not happy, like the beauty means something.

Bright. Pain. Thoughts. Disjointed. No. Sense. I want to call for help but I know no one who might come. So slowly I become used to the bright. It comes from a circle that I can see if I look over my right shoulder not towards the ground. I do not look too much because my neck is pain.
It is nice to have nothing to do but I am cold. I learn cold is not cold if there is no warm and I cannot move. I have no will to move. There is a smooth thing attached to me and it seems to keep me alive. It is long and I get the feeling that to rip it out would hurt me. I feel like I do not know what hurt is. I know no feeling but nothingness and I cannot even move anymore because there is no energy in my soul. It has slipped out the cracks like water.
But I have not ended. I am still able to know that I am here and that must mean I am meant to be here. That is what I tell myself though it feels like I cannot really control myself anymore. I tell myself and tell myself though it feels like I can’t hear myself anymore. The warm wetness from my eyeballs is what ends this cycle. It brings back a bit of myself and with it a bit of my pain, mainly in the center of my grimy bare chest.
* * *

Laying on warm softness. Worried about something, everyone is worried about something but I do not know what. I see the white room, big with white-covered white people and something cold on my finger and then blackness.
* * *

How long have I been not with my body? I do not know and immediately do not care. Where I am now is safe and better than that place. As soon as the thought comes into being it pops like a bubble. What was that place? No matter.

I feel a light buzzing in my head like there is a thing with wings that is trapped like I am in this place but that remembers where it should be and tries constantly to get there. I feel like my thoughts have to yell to each other over the torment, so I stop thinking. This is a hard thing but it works until I wonder if not thinking is a thought so it is not working and I am more confused and muddled than before. Then I think about how my teeth don’t have sweaters anymore but they have clouds. But what is a sweater and what is a cloud? I used to know…

The buzzing fades and is replaced with a slow awareness of my limbs, which I thought would be nice to feel, but is not. It feels like I must move them and do something but I think that they have not the strength to do anything. So that is frustration but frustration is not like coldness. You keep noticing it and it does not go away. So I feel more frustration and then annoyance. There is no point in keeping me here in this place with nothing but my confused memory and no hope. But then I think about hope and I think that if I am still in this place and not gone to a better one I must have some hope left. And I cannot get rid of this hope and go to this place that is not pain.
If I cannot go I must take the pain from this place but I do not know how to take pain other than wait so all I do is wait but the pain comes again stronger and it feels very bad. So I try to move my finger and it moves but then I feel more pain. My bones are like sticks with yellow skin hanging from them. I will work and I will give them strength again but it will be more pain. Pain comes with strength because weakness means you can ignore it all.
So I move my legs a little bit whenever the pain dies down and it becomes easier to move them over a very long time. And then I realize that I have not slept in a long time and I try to sleep.
* * *

When I wake up I wonder if I am not a woman but a monster. What I remember is that humans do not think this way, they think with clarity and mild stupidity. Some of my muscle is gone now but I work more and one day I can sit up in the room and I am proud. Then I slump and see the floor close again. But now I am comforted by that I can sit up, I can do something and I will do something. I will tell the people that did this what it is like to be a monster and they will be afraid of what they have done. But I know no way to leave this small place and find the people. My thoughts are not words, they are bubbles, so I do not know if I can tell them how it feels. But I feel every part of the small place and I feel that there is a place where the long tube comes in from the wall and that is the only thing that is not solid blackness other than the light that I cannot stand high enough to touch.

This is not good and it makes worrying that I might stay here until my body gives out and so I make my hand sticky and I make the tube sticky and I take the tube in my hands and I pull and nothing happens at first because I am broken. But they did not expect this hope that drives me so I pull and the tube slides out and into my hands and then there is a hole in the wall but my body will give out soon with the tube in my hands, not my stomach. So I make the hole in the wall bigger and it is like a trance, must be bigger, bigger, so soon I climb out. Everything is loud and bright and too much and now falling.
* * *

I open my eyes slowly. I am back in a bright white place. I don’t know if this is better or worse than…what? All I remember is pain and confusion. This is definitely better. My thoughts come freely now. They make sense and come together and mix and create new thoughts. They could not hide me forever. I will always have cracks, but I am whole again. I will not be a pawn in your games of madness. I will not be your monster. But my ring is gone. That meant something to me. I wonder if it might’ve given me the strength to get out.
* * *

They say I was there for 5 years. I say I was there long enough to realize hope means something. The news was everywhere when I left the hospital. They should not have hidden me, but they were proud. They wanted to say that nothing had ever gone wrong. But you can’t mess too much. Humans are fragile things, easily twisted or shattered.