“Medication time!,” rasped the nurse. All the patients and I lined up behind the counter. As the last patient sulked away, I scooted up, face to face with the short, shriveled up nurse. “Could you rate your depression on a scale from one to five?,” the nurse growled in a smoky voice with a hollow stare. I made a promise to myself that I would be honest from now on. 

“Honestly, a five,” I croaked. 

“Could you rate your anxiety on a scale from one to five?,” the nurse commenced in her terrible growl, basically cutting me off.

“Five,” I now chose to respond robotically.

“Do you feel like hurting yourself?”

“Not really.” 

“Do you feel like hurting anyone else?”

“No,” I urgently replied with a confident intention. The nurse hardly even glanced up as the questions went on. The last thing I want is for anyone here to think I am a threat. I felt it was best to refrain from making even the slightest of a friendship during my stay at this dreadful place. I need to lay low and serve my time, I thought as I glanced at the blurred reflections of other patients through the sticky plastic window above the nurse’s counter. 

“Would you tell me or anyone else here if you felt like hurting yourself or others at any point during your day?” 

“Yes,” I concluded and the nurse turned around to look over my records. She mumbled to herself softly as she scanned her long fingernail up and down the wall of small rectangular metal drawers. She pressed a button, and a drawer near the middle of the rest of the other drawers slid open, crashing as its innards rolled towards the front. The nurse pulled out an orange bottle filled with blue pills and a small plastic pouch with a giant pink pill inside tin foil wrapping. She placed her cold fingers in my cupped hands which I had stretched through the small circular hole cut out in the sticky plastic barrier that separated the nurse and I. She placed a blue pill in my palm, which was my mood stabilizer, along with that pink pill, which I did not recognize. She then told me I was to only take the pink pill if I was feeling “panicked,” like I had expressed to her earlier. She explained that it would help calm me down. I was certainly feeling on edge, so I decided to take the mysterious pill. I picked up the small paper cup the nurse had left on the counter, and took each pill individually. I never learned to take two pills at once. 

I spun around swiftly, and a male nurse greeted me motioning towards a white board which pictured an expo marker drawing of the room we were in but in a bird's eye view. In the bottom left corner, a circle with my name written in red and the name “Chanel” which was written in blue like the rest of the other names and circles on the board. I walked over to the table in which the circle represented, and saw a chubby little girl with short black hair, brown skin, and strangely big eyes that were desperately staring at me as I approached. To the right of her was a tall, clear skinned, blonde headed, young nurse in dark blue scrubs. A circular embroidery which read “Pellissippi Community College” was sewn into the top left of her shirt. She sat on her phone chuckling every now and then. I sat down at the table, stared down at my feet for a minute, and then, deciding to look up, I picked up a sticky coloring book, and grabbed a few markers out of the sticky tupperware bucket in the middle of the cold, gray, table. 

With crossed arms and her now narrow positioned eyes, Chanel nodded her head gesturing at me, “why you tell dat nurse: cinco, cinco, cinco, para todo?,” her short hair bobbed left and right with each syllable she pronounced. 

“Because that’s how I feel,” I hesitantly answered.

“Ayy the larger the number you say the longer you stay mijo,” she emphasized the words larger: say and longer: stay to suggest they go hand and hand, like an analogy. I just stared at her, realizing what she said made perfect sense, and wondering how I could be so stupid. The blonde nurse didn’t even look up from her phone.  

“Medication time!”

“Depression on a scale from one through five” 

“About three,”  I said, so my lie did not seem too obvious.

“Anxiety on a scale from one through five.” 

“Four.”

“You feel like hurting yourself.” 

“No.”

“Anybody else?”

“No.”

“Tell somebody if you do?”

“No- uh, I mean yes!,” I chuckled slightly.

“Mhm,” sighed the nurse as she floated over to the medicine wall. “Zoloft, birth control, as you requested yesterday, and you wanna take that hydroxyzine today Madeline?” 

“Yes please,” as I returned my cupped hand through the small plastic hole again. I scuffled to my table after shivering down the pills. Chanel and I became friends, even though I had vowed I would lay low. We snarled and pinched our noses each time we peeled open our styrofoam take out boxes that contained what was a lousy excuse for breakfast. Inside my box was mostly cold eggs, soggy french toast, and a plastic container of lukewarm syrup. The time went by slowly, and we sat in the big room all day in this fluorescent lightning that made it hard to put down your head to rest. Chanel and I drew pictures of each other on the backs of coloring sheets that were essentially just clip art photos from google stenciled on basic printer paper. 

Sometimes we would try drawing with our left arm, drawing with our eyes closed, and one time we even tried to draw with our toes, but got in trouble for taking our socks off. I learned that Chanel was fifteen, that she has a pet snake named… Chanel. I learned that she hates her mom and that she tried to overdose on sleeping pills one night. She told me many stories, mostly in broken English, and that mostly consisted of events that occurred during her quinceanera. She taught me swear words in Spanish. We sat next to each other when we had guest speakers, and made fun of each speaker’s stupid activities they forced us to participate in. We would open our eyes and make faces at each other during meditation time, start dancing during stretches, and write notes to each other during “silent journaling time.” She complained to me about her roommate, Leah, and how she would cry every night, and scream at her to get out of the room. 

“La puerta está abierta toda la noche… es so creepy, I don’t want dem starin at me when Im  sleepin,” she stated sternly and seriously, but it was hard for me to take her accent seriously. Later that day, we requested we be roommates. 

“Medication time!” 

“Depression one through five?”

“Two.”

“Anxiety?” 

“One.” 

“Feel like hurting yourself?”

“No.”

“Anybody else?”

“No.”

“Tell me if you do?”

“Yes,” I smiled as I held my hand through the little window, cupped my hand to my mouth, shot the water down my throat, crumpled up the paper cup, swallowed, and skipped to my designated seat next to Chanel. Each day we would wake up to the sound of the nurse softly knocking on our door. We would giggle at our reflections in the wobbly, plastic, mirror while we would brush our teeth. We would wait in line together to get our vitals checked. I remember we called the blood pressure machine “the cow” because it made a mooing sound as the pillowy cushion tightened around your upper arm. I would trade my cold french toast for her cold hash brown. We would work on our puzzle that was now half way through. We would attempt braiding each other's hair, then get in trouble shortly after for too much physical contact. We would make a fort out of the blue plastic chairs. We would order the nurses to fetch snacks and apple juice for us. We loved bossing the nurses around, because there was nothing they could do about it. We would later hide the snacks in our baggy scrubs and hoard them under our beds for late night snacks. We figured out how to work the shower together. You have to turn the lever three times to the left rather than twice to the right. I still remember that. 

“Medication time!”

“Depression?”

“Zero.”

“Anxiety?”

“None.” 

“Wannahurtyaself?”

“Nope.”

“Anyonelse?”

“Nah.”

“Tellmeifyado?”

“Yeah,” *Plat* *Plat* *Slurp* *Gulp* 

“We ran out of puzzles,” sighed Leah as she ran her stubby fingers over our gallery of finished projects. I remember when Leah finally came around a few days after trying to accept her reality. She had watched Chanel and I at our table everyday, having fun, solving puzzles, and drawing pictures. We invited her to sit at our table one day, even though it wasn’t her assigned seat. The nurses were so understaffed that they stopped trying to care. Leah had two giant bandages on both of her wrists, and they were now rainbow colored from all the old markers that leaked all over our hands every time they were used. Leah was sixteen years old, and she had a room to herself now that Chanel moved in with me. Once I left I'm pretty sure they roomed together. 

At first I felt like I didn’t belong there. I only stayed at the hospital for seven days. I still think about how strangely comforting it was there. We had the same routine each day. Our dorms were blank. There were nothing but two beds in each corner, two sinks, and a bookshelf. As the days went by we decorated our walls with pictures we drew. We stuck them on the wall with stickers from an outdated sticker book. We would re-stick them each morning when they would fall off during the night. We would brush our teeth, take showers, braid each other's hair in secret, unravel our curls, order the nurses to bring us apple juice, do our puzzles, trade our french toast and hash browns, tell stories, and sneak snacks back to our room. Everything was simple, there were no problems, no drama, and no secrets. For most people, this repetition can feel almost like a genre of hell. To me, it was a break from reality, and a time to reset.

The people I met there are people I don’t think I can forget no matter how much I feel like I should. We knew everything about each other. We knew nothing about each other. I don't think I could even tell you anyone’s last name. We sat in that fluorescent lighting all day, traveled back to our rooms in lines at night, only to wake up and return to that fluorescent lighting the next morning. There were never any deadlines, choices to make, or things to do. All we had was each other. Nothing changed, but our cold, gray, table grew and became a bit warmer. We had new patients pull up their blue plastic chairs every day. The more people joined, the more laughter, conversions, and stories there were, and we began to finish our puzzles quicker.