Chapter 48
I woke up already knowing something had gone wrong.
I just lay there for a moment, staring up at a ceiling that didn’t belong to me. It was too indifferent to hold onto, like it refused to give me anything familiar to anchor myself in.
The smell hit next.
It crept in when I took a deeper breath, something sterile and empty that didn’t carry history with it, didn’t carry anything, and that’s what made it wrong.
Because I was used to places that carried something inside them, places that smelled lived in, ruined by whatever had happened there long before I arrived, but this place felt stripped down to nothing, as if even the walls had been taught not to remember.
That’s when I noticed my arms.
Wrapped, wrong in a way that didn’t line up with anything I could immediately place, and when I finally turned my head just enough to see them properly, I saw the bandages, the way they were layered thick around both arms it all came back.
That’s the strange part, little Ghost. You’d think there’d be something left after a thing like that.
Some crack in me. Guilt, rage. Anything at all clawing its way to the surface just to prove I was still human enough to feel it.
But there was nothing. Just this flat, hollow awareness settling in my chest like it had always been there and I was only noticing it now because everything else had gone quiet.
I hadn’t died and that didn’t feel like a relief, instead it felt like a continuation I hadn’t agreed to.
Someone had spoken to me earlier, or maybe later, time didn’t really sit right.
It slipped around too easily and I couldn’t pin down when it happened, only that it had.
A doctor speaking somewhere beside me, his voice fading into noise halfway through the sentences.
They found me in the cell. There had been blood everywhere.
My heart had almost stopped before they got me out.
Then came the part about keeping me there for a while longer, as if my body had become something unstable they needed to monitor in case it finally collapsed for good.
I remember looking at him, but I didn’t acknowledge him.
I just let the words pass through me like they weren’t meant to stay. The days that followed didn’t feel like days, more like gaps, spaces where something should have happened but didn’t.
Nurses came in and out, checked things, adjusted things, placed food where it was expected to be, and sometimes they tried to talk to me.
Small things, harmless, questions that were meant to fill the silence so it didn’t feel so heavy.
I never gave them anything back, because there was nothing there to give.
Somewhere in that silence, something settled into place in a way it never had before.
I started to understand how a person could stop existing long before their body followed.
How you could still be here, still breathing and yet, something essential had already stepped away.
It wasn’t visible, but it was there. People who grow up being held, being wanted, being given something soft to build themselves around, they see the world as something they can move through, something that might hurt but won’t consume them.
That had never been my version of it, mine had always been about survival.
About staying intact just long enough to make it to the next moment, and now even that felt unnecessary.
I lay there staring at nothing, feeling my body somewhere beneath me like it belonged to somebody else, and for the first time since everything fell apart, there was no resistance left in me at all.
They weren’t letting me go. I understood it before the conversation was even over.
Their voices had that same false gentleness people use around dangerous animals, speaking to me like I was too unstable to hear the truth unless they buried it beneath layers of concern.
My body was moved instead of dismissed, from the way there was always someone standing just a little too close, like I wasn’t expected to walk anywhere on my own anymore.
I remember sitting on the edge of the bed when they came in, my hands resting in my lap, wrapped, not even hurting the way they should have, just there like evidence someone had decided to keep intact.
I didn’t look at them when they spoke, I just listened.
Because looking would have meant engaging, and I truly didn’t have anything left in me that wanted to participate in whatever that was supposed to be.
They told me I wasn’t going back to prison, and after that the room fell still in a way that made it obvious they were waiting for me to say something.
I could feel their attention fixed on me, expecting questions, resistance, some kind of reaction that would prove the words had actually reached me, but there was nothing inside me reaching back for them.
I just sat there with that empty, exhausted feeling spreading deeper through my chest, because prison or this place no longer felt like separate fates to me.
The walls changed, but the cage didn’t. When they explained why, they of course talked about the incident in the yard. The way they couldn’t pull me off him without force, what I did to myself.
Not safe.
Not safe for others, not safe to be left alone and not safe to be trusted with my own body, so they moved me.
A closed psychiatric ward, locked and watched.
Controlled in a way that made the prison feel almost simple in comparison, because this wasn’t just about where I could go, it was about what I was allowed to be, what I was allowed to think, what I was allowed to do without someone stepping in and correcting it, observing it, documenting it like I was something that needed to be studied before it could be understood.
They spoke like this was protection, like this was the best possible outcome after everything that had happened, and maybe it was.
I didn’t have any questions lined up inside my head, because the truth was, it didn’t feel like anything had changed.
A locked door is a locked door, it doesn’t matter what they call it.
They started putting me in a room with a psychiatrist. Same room every time, same chair across from me, same stupid distance like someone had decided exactly how far another person could sit from me without it becoming a risk.
I noticed that before I noticed him, because I didn’t trust faces anymore, I trust repetition, and repetition either holds or it breaks.
I knew he was there, of course I did, I could hear him move, hear the way his clothes shifted when he sat down, the scrape of the chair, the breath before he spoke, but I kept my eyes down, fixed on my hands, on the bandages, on anything that didn’t ask me to decide if it was real or not.
You see, little Ghost, once you realize your mind can build something that convincing, something that can sit next to you for years and feel more real than anything else in the room, you don’t just lose trust in that thing, you lose trust in everything that comes after it.
So no, I wasn’t about to look at him and just accept him as real, not that easily.
He talked, of course he did, that was his job, but he didn’t do it like the others I’d seen before, not like the ones who tried to drag something out of you, who push, who repeat questions until you either answer or shut down harder.
He spoke like the silence didn’t scare him, like he knew it would sit there whether he filled it or not, and that somehow made it worse.
Because silence isn’t empty for me, it never has been.
It’s crowded, loud in a way that doesn’t make sound but still presses against everything, and he just sat in it like it didn’t touch him at all. I didn’t trust him.
Not him as a person, but him as a possibility.
If I could sit in a forest and talk to someone who wasn’t there, if I could walk through almost my entire life with something beside me that never existed outside my own head, if I could let that thing guide me, justify me, become me, then what the fuck was stopping this from being the same thing all over again? What if I was just doing it again?
So I watched without looking at him and I stayed silent.
It went on like that for a while, I don’t know how long, but he kept showing up.
One time, doesn’t matter which one, he asked something simple and he just left it there.
He didn’t repeat it, he just waited and something in me reacted before I could stop it, a small nod as my eyes rose to meet his.
I dropped my gaze immediately, like I’d done something I wasn’t supposed to.
After that, things started changing in ways I couldn’t fully control.
I still didn’t speak, every instinct in me recoiling from the thought of forcing words past my throat, but my body had already started giving things away for me.
Small reactions slipped out before I could bury them again.
A pause for too long, my eyes lifting toward a voice when somebody entered the room, stuff like that.
Tiny betrayals that said more than speech ever could.
At some point along the way, a word slipped out.
It felt wrong, like it didn’t belong to me anymore, like I’d forgotten how to use it and my mouth was just trying anyway.
After that, more came.