vulnerablilities

From inside the walls of a hospital, incarcerated for an eating disorder, this character describes the experience of having to share a room with others, of the groggy nights of medication without sleep, the mornings of standing on the scales in a skimpy h

I woke up at three forty-nine this morning with the shock I experience each time I open my eyes & see, in the gloomy darkness, the cardboardish roof-rafts & my bright brown wardrobe that make up the space behind my curtain - the only thing that has given me any privacy in the last three and a half weeks from the three other girls I share a room with. There are so many things I want to pull from this sentence this that I'm not even quite sure where to start, though it seems lacking in importance what I begin with anyway - anything to distract from the now & nothing to remind me of what I have to do tomorrow.

Its strange - the fear that opening your eyes at strange hours of the morning, groggy with benzodiazepines in the moments before you remember where you are. I have to tell myself: thirteen A & it really will be okay - before I roll over to check my phone for the time, even though I know excatly what time it is. Its the same time every night. Its difficult to ground yourself in the dark but usually if I can just pull my red quilt off the ground & find Mikey at the end of the bed its enough to just pull myself into a ball & let the drugs make my eyes close without having to see the awful things that haunt my eyes-shut vision.

& it frightens me - the way all there is is a curtain between me & the world. I hate sharing a room but Tracey says that its important to be around people at the moment. Sam says I'd do "to much" if I had my own room but I miss my view & I don't know what she's talking about anyway. It scares me so much that there is only a piece of fabric between me & the world. We must be so vulnerable.

I look at my hand & I've got some sort of scrawl that translates into "ANNIE + PB" that I must have written before I tapped my light three times to turn it off. Annie asked me to remind her that she wanted to try peanut butter at breakfast but she might accidently on purpose forget but because I would really accidently forget, I wrote it down. & at seven o'clock this morning when I tripped via the group room in my gown that was coming undone at the straps, Michelle's borrowed book in one hand, to steal a rug to hide under while we waited to see whether Virginia or Leah would trespass our blanket blockade to steal our most precious & frightening personal numbers I saw it there & remembered. The thing was, Annie took her toast before I slipped past her, avoiding the pile of plates & the server behind the counter & was sitting at the table, spreading peanut butter on the brown pieces of bread they try to tell us is toast before I'd had a chance to break my weetbix (once, thank you very much) & have my missing toast noticed.

Author's Note

Extract