Chapter 50
They told me there were only a few months left.
They just dropped it in the middle of a sentence, like I was a date on a calendar they were slowly approaching.
I remember sitting there, thinking that it didn’t feel like an ending.
It felt like being pushed out of something that, against every instinct, had started to hold me together in a way nothing else ever had.
The days didn’t change.
Same walls, same voices, same trays of food that all tasted like nothing.
Same chairs, same rooms, same everything until it stopped feeling repetitive and started feeling dependable, which is a word I never thought I’d associate with a place like that.
And I hate that I’m saying this, little Ghost, but a part of me wanted it to stay that way.
Because in there, I wasn’t dangerous. I wasn’t making decisions that spiraled out into something I couldn’t undo.
I wasn’t reacting on instinct, I wasn’t becoming something worse every time I lost control, I was just contained.
And for once, that didn’t feel like punishment, it felt like a boundary I didn’t have to fight against. There’s something twisted about realizing you function better when you’re not free.
That the version of you that doesn’t get to choose is somehow safer, not just for everyone else, but also for yourself.
I could feel it in my body too, and there was nothing gentle about it.
The medication spread through me like a slow chemical death, flattening every thought, every instinct, every feeling into something distant and muffled until even existing started to feel unreal.
I was tired all the time, and sleep never touched it.
The exhaustion spread through every part of me until even my own thoughts started feeling distant. Nothing hit the way it should anymore.
Fear passed through me too fast. Anger never reached its full force. Even grief felt restrained somehow, trapped behind whatever the medication had done to my head, and after a while I started hating it more than the pain itself.
Like I was watching my own life through something instead of being fully inside it, but I wasn’t breaking.
That was the biggest difference. No violent swings, just this steady, muted version of myself that didn’t spiral out of control every time something shifted.
So yeah, maybe it was something. Not good, but…
something that worked better than what I had been before.
That didn’t mean I trusted it, though. It didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of what it was taking from me, because it was taking something, I could feel that too.
Reactions that got cut off before they fully formed, thoughts that never became clear enough to become dangerous.
A part of me wondered: what happens when you sand something down enough times?
Do you end up with something stable, or do you just erase it?
Either way, I followed the routine and I took what they gave me, because for the first time in my life, nothing inside me was trying to tear its way out.
I didn’t know if that meant I was finally under control, or just drugged enough to forget what I was.
In the months leading up to my release, my thoughts kept finding their way back to him. Like my head refused to leave it alone, kept dragging me back there every time things got too peaceful, like it needed to press on that bruise just to make sure it was still there.
Zwierek.
Me.
Even thinking his name felt wrong, and it wasn’t because it didn’t fit, but because it fit too well. I still couldn’t fully wrap my head around it. I could understand it, logically. I could repeat it back to myself in a way that sounded convincing enough.
He wasn’t real. He never existed outside of me. It was all in my head.
But it didn’t sit right, didn’t settle into something solid I could stand on, because it didn’t feel like something I had imagined, it felt like something I had known. That’s the part that truly stayed with me. Because when you realize someone was never there, you don’t just lose them.
You lose every moment you thought you shared with them, and I had built so much around him.
Conversations, silence, decisions, justifications, he had been there in the moments that mattered and now, nothing.
It should have felt like abandonment, like everyone else, but it didn’t.
Because the more I sat with it, the more something else started to creep in underneath all that confusion, another thought appeared.
He couldn’t leave, not like everyone else had.
They come close, they stay for a while if you’re lucky, then they go and they disappear in a way that leaves something behind that you can’t fix.
That’s how it works, that’s how it always worked, but him, he never walked away.
Never decided I was too much, too wrong, too damaged to stay near, because he couldn’t.
Because wherever I went, he was already there.
That realization did something to me, something I don’t even know how to explain without it sounding completely fucked, but it felt like another form of relief.
Because for once, something in my life didn’t depend on someone else’s choice. It didn’t rely on them staying, it didn’t hang on whether they could tolerate me long enough, it was just… there.
Even now, even after everything, I could still feel him from time to time.
A presence without form, a shape, like a habit my brain hadn’t fully let go of yet and I didn’t fight it.
Maybe I should have, but I couldn’t. Because pushing him away felt too close to pushing parts of myself away, and I had already seen what happens when I start pretending parts of me don’t exist. So instead, I let it sit and I started looking at it differently.
Because if I really strip it all down, if I take away the explanation, the diagnosis, the clinical way they would frame it, what was he really?
A voice that stayed when everything else left.
A presence that didn’t disappear when things got too heavy, something that filled the space when there was nothing else there.
That’s survival.
Twisted and dangerous, but still, survival.
And if he was part of me, if he had always been part of me, then that meant something else too.
It meant that I had never been completely alone.
Even when it felt like it, even when I was.
There has always been something in there with me, and I don’t know if that’s comforting or terrifying.
Maybe it’s both, but I stopped trying to separate us, because maybe that was never the point.
Maybe the point wasn’t to get rid of him; maybe the point was to understand what part of me needed him in the first place and what that says about what I am.
I had too much time alone with my own head in there.
The same memories kept returning over and over, each time dragging something new to the surface, until eventually they stopped feeling separate from each other.
They started connecting in ways I couldn’t ignore anymore, forming something ugly and undeniable in front of me.
Once I saw it clearly, there was no forcing myself blind to it again.
They called it care, that’s the word they used for everything that had happened to me.
Care, support. But if that’s what it was, then why did it always come after something broke?
Why was there always a threshold I had to cross first, something I had to become, something I had to do, before anyone stepped in and decided I was worth managing. I thought about that a lot.
Lying in that room, walking those same halls, sitting in those same chairs while people wrote notes about me like I was a case instead of a person.
Because it didn’t feel like they were trying to keep people well, it felt more like they were waiting for them to fall apart in a way that could be documented.
There’s no reward in something that never breaks, but the second it does, the second someone becomes visible enough and dangerous enough, then everything moves.
Then suddenly there are people, resources, systems that come alive around you, not to prevent it from happening again, but to contain what already happened.
And I sat there thinking, if their entire structure depends on people like me reaching that point, what exactly are they trying to fix?
Because if everyone stayed whole, if no one cracked, no one spiraled, no one ended up where I did, what would be left for them to do?
The answer wasn’t comforting, and it didn’t stop there, it spread.
The same logic showing up in places that had nothing to do with me directly, but somehow still felt connected.
Wars that never ended because ending them meant cutting off the flow of something bigger.
Systems that claimed they couldn’t afford to keep people alive properly, while burning through more in a day than most people would ever see in a lifetime, and we’re supposed to believe there’s no other way.
I stopped believing that, because the more I looked at it, the more it felt like everything was built to keep itself running, not to fix what it claimed to exist for.
If something actually worked, if it solved the problem completely, it would make itself irrelevant.
Systems don’t survive by making themselves unnecessary.
Banks don’t exist to erase debt, they exist because debt continues. Pharmaceutical companies don’t exist because people get cured, they exist because people keep needing something.
Politics doesn’t exist to solve everything, because if everything was solved, there would be nothing left to promise.
It’s all sustained and maintained. And people like me, we just end up inside it.
I started seeing it everywhere. Not as something that happened to me specifically, just part of a structure that doesn’t really care who it catches, as long as it keeps catching someone.
And the worst part, the part that stuck with me the most, was realizing how easily everyone plays along.
A room full of broken people, pointing at each other like they’re different, like one kind of damage is somehow more acceptable than another.
Like the way someone falls apart determines whether they’re judged or treated.
I was no different, I sat there too.
And still, nothing of it changed anything, because at the end of it, I was still there, until I wasn’t.
They told me I was stabilized. They said it with the kind of confidence people borrow from medical terms, as if a word could erase what had happened inside me.
As if I hadn’t simply been reduced into something easier to manage through routine, surveillance, and enough medication to keep the worst parts of me sedated.
They gave me papers with instructions and follow-ups.
Things I was supposed to do once I was out, as if stepping outside those walls wouldn’t immediately shift everything again.
I stood there after they were done speaking, staring at the open doorway while the reality of it settled over me inch by inch.
Something pulled tight in my chest when I finally forced myself to move.
Even then, it felt unreal, like my mind still hadn’t caught up to the fact that nobody was stopping me from leaving.
Two years.
That’s what it had become once it was written down on paper.
A sentence.
A fixed amount of time people could point to and decide was enough, as if everything that happened inside those years could be contained by numbers and signatures.
But it didn’t feel finished. It didn’t feel like anything had been completed, if anything, it felt like something had been paused.
Held in place long enough for it to stop moving, stop breaking and now it was being released again.
They handed me back to the world like I was something that had been fixed enough to function.
I stepped outside and the air felt wrong, different in a way my body didn’t recognize anymore.
It almost felt too open, like there was suddenly too much space around me and nothing holding it together.
There were no routines waiting, no one telling me when to wake up, where to go, what to do.
And that was the problem. In there, everything had been controlled and limited.
I knew exactly what I was capable of inside those walls.
I knew the boundaries, I knew where I ended.
Out here, I didn’t.
Out here, there was no one stopping me, no one stepping in before something went too far, just me.
And after everything I had seen, after everything I had done, after realizing that the thing I had been blaming all along had been me the entire time, that didn’t feel like freedom.
It felt like being handed a loaded gun and told to figure out how not to use it without hurting anyone in the process.