Day One, or Notes on Grace
They will have to send a police officer, she tells me, it’s just protocol, but I’m barely listening, still rolling the last question she asked around in my mouth, trying to decide if I said the right thing. There is reason beyond reason, once you dig through the bedrock, to surrender your agency and will to the psychiatrist on the other side of the desk. What was I doing with it anyway? Wandering the streets of Boise after the August heat had abandoned the asphalt, seeking answers in chain-link fences and shallow river beds. Passive attempts at dying because the will to die had not yet outlived the will to live, but I have been here before, lapped at the dredges of that desire for years, and I don’t know if I have the energy anymore. This isn’t how it is everywhere, she continues. I used to be able to call an ambulance. The moment is always different in your head.
Something like a movie: the character walks to the police station and surrenders themselves. They get a chance to say goodbyes, prepare their things, make aware who needs to be made aware. I wasn’t ignorant of the future coming at me— the chances were good that I would end up in a supervised room to keep the disease that was me, my thoughts, or my behaviors, at bay— I just thought I would have more time. But that’s the nature of the question, will you be able to stop yourself next time you want to die? It brings the future to its knees. A closed question.
Yes means taking inventory of yourself—an eighteen-year-old almost college drop-out, closeted queer, who has wanted to die more often than not for at least five years, living in a dorm with high school friends who are peeling off your orbit, months away from dropping out themselves—and finding anything to keep going.
No means you are deeper in your disease than you can even know, that it will take you time to understand how far you have gone, how much farther you have in you.
I don’t know means no.
You should call someone. My parents are teaching, so don’t pick up, but the psychiatrist tells me she will call them later. I get a hold of a friend who brings down my treasured copy of The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, but I don’t get to see her face, which I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or not, but perhaps that decision is best taken from me too. Inpatient requires you get checked out at the emergency room, the psychiatrist continues, but I can get them to accept you if we get paramedics to do it here before the officer takes you. How does that sound?
I didn’t yet listen to enough punk to know what A.C.A.B. meant but growing up in rural North Idaho taught me to keep my distance from any man with a gun, enough to feel the reality I had stepped into when the officer showed up with handcuffs and told me he would be taking me somewhere where I could work on myself, which meant the curb outside of the student health center, where I was attached to machines to capture how my body keeps living despite itself and asked more questions. Have you taken any drugs or alcohol recently? Have you been hospitalized before? Are you taking any medications?
The questions I will be asked, once again, in the waiting room at inpatient before the nurse takes me back and I beg, pushing beyond my luck, to not be put with the other men, who I believe, or have been led to believe, to carry violence in their mouths and hate in their movements, and the nurse, exhausted, perhaps at shift change, relents, but takes no note so the next morning, I am brought to the males side anyway. But this is all afterwards: after the police takes me downstairs, after I awkwardly joke to alleviate tension, as if to the paramedics, I am not just half-an-hour of an unremarkable day, another suicidally depressed college student, another day, after the officer puts me in handcuffs and gently guides my head down into the plastic back seats, where I will try and fail to decide if the officer’s kindness makes up for the fact that yes, he has a gun, yes I am handcuffed, and yes, I never claimed to want to hurt anyone but myself, after the fifteen minute drive from downtown to the inpatient hospital, where I sat in the backseat of a police car, headed towards an unknown place, wondering if I will ever know if I could’ve stopped myself the next time I wanted to die.
The sun setting over Boise, my once-home, now forever the land that brought me to my knees, that sent me to the office of the psychiatrist, who I will forever thank, even if I’m never sure I told her the truth.
