Chapter 48 #2
No, maybe. Nothing that could be used against me, but it was enough for him.
Or at least he acted like it was. He said it without trying to sell it to me.
No pressure, no this will help you feel better bullshit.
He just laid it out, direct, like he already knew I wasn’t the kind of person who could be convinced, only managed.
Medication. The word just sat there, but it didn’t feel medical.
It felt like someone reaching into my head with clean hands and deciding what parts were acceptable to keep.
I just sat there with my hands resting on my thighs, feeling the bandages pull when I flexed my fingers, that constant reminder that my body had already been intervened with once and survived it, and now they wanted to do the same thing again, just somewhere I couldn’t see.
He said something about stabilizing me, about preventing another episode, about making things quieter in my head.
That word really stuck, because I knew what quiet felt like, I had just come from it.
Lying there in my own blood, watching everything inside me go still in a way that didn’t ask for permission. That wasn’t something I wanted back.
I shifted in the chair, leaned forward just a bit, elbows on my knees, eyes still down, tracing the edge of the bandage with my thumb without thinking about it.
What if he was right? That thought dragged itself in, unwelcome, because whatever was in my head, it had been enough to build something that walked beside me for years, spoke to me, influenced everything I did and I hadn’t even questioned it, not once.
And now he was telling me there was something that could dampen that, change it.
There’s a line, you know. Between something being a cure and something being poison, the only difference is how much of it they give you and how much of you it takes in return.
I could feel my chest tighten again, because I didn’t trust “normal”.
I didn’t even know what that meant. What looks stable from one side looks completely broken from another; what keeps one person alive is what destroys someone else.
If I let them touch this, if I let them adjust it, what would be left?
Or maybe that was the point.
Maybe there wasn’t supposed to be anything left.
I didn’t want it. There was nothing in me that wanted to swallow something and hand over control of whatever this was, whatever I was, to someone else’s idea of what it should be. But I wasn’t stupid either, I knew how this worked.
I knew what happened to people who didn’t cooperate, who didn’t follow what was put in front of them, who made themselves “difficult” in systems like this.
They don’t release you faster, they hold you longer and I wasn’t staying there any longer than I had to, so I nodded and just like that, it was decided.
I would let them put something inside me, not because I believed it would fix anything, but because I understood the system better than I trusted myself.
After a while, the days stopped feeling distinct from each other.
Light through the window. Darkness again.
Nurses changing shifts. Food arrived beside the bed only to go cold beside me.
The same hallway sounds repeating until they started feeling detached from time itself.
I existed inside routines more than actual days, and eventually even that began to feel unreal.
At some point, I couldn’t hold my own head anymore.
It wasn’t like before. Back then I could force it down far enough to survive it, keep everything sealed somewhere deep inside myself where it couldn’t reach the surface unless I let it.
Now it kept coming back harder every day, swelling inside my head until it felt unbearable to exist in the same space as my own thoughts.
I needed somewhere to put it, so I started writing.
I picked up a pen because if I didn’t, I was going to split open from the inside, and at least this way something would come out that wasn’t blood.
At first it was nothing, half thoughts, things that didn’t connect, didn’t form anything complete, just words dragged out of me and dropped onto paper like I was emptying my pockets without checking what was in them.
With time, the thoughts started turning into sentences.
I didn’t sit there planning it, but the more I wrote, the more it pulled from the same places, the same memories, the same moments that had already been tearing through me.
And before I really understood what I was doing, I was writing about my life.
It was all there, the orphanage, Krysyna, Bartosz, the door, Zwierek, no, me.
It felt wrong and right at the same time.
Like I was forcing something into the open that had never been meant to be seen all at once.
Like I was peeling back layers that had kept me functioning, and a part of me wanted to stop, to drop the pen, to shut it down before it went too far, but I couldn’t.
I needed to see it. Maybe if I wrote enough of it down, if I dragged every piece out and laid it in front of me, I’d finally understand what the fuck was wrong with me.
Or maybe I wouldn’t.
Maybe I’d just reach the bottom of it, hit whatever was waiting down there and realize there was nothing to fix. Either way, I kept going.
There’s something so twisted about it. About wanting to show something and hide it at the same time, because that’s what it was.
I was putting everything down, every detail, every thought, everything I’d done and still keeping it locked to myself.
Like I needed it out of me, but not that far out.
The more I wrote, the quieter it got in my head.
Like I had finally given it somewhere else to exist so it didn’t have to live entirely inside me anymore.
I think that was the closest I’ve ever come to relief, because the truth is, little Ghost, you either turn around and face what’s been following you your entire life, or it keeps growing behind you until it’s the only thing left. And this, this was the first time I stopped running.
Maybe that’s all this was.
An excuse, to call it something else.
Writing.
Because if I could dress it up like that, like something intentional, something creative, then maybe I didn’t have to call it what it actually was.
A slow, careful descent into everything I had spent my life trying not to understand, and maybe that’s the only real difference.
Some people go insane unnoticed, and some people give it a name and call it art.
I just wrote until there was nothing left in me that hadn’t been dragged out onto the page.