Tear Gas and Hospital Gowns

I don’t remember much of high school. The childhood summer mansion where we played out our fantasies for the future: this was where my life started, ended, and currently resides in a daydream.

What is the present moment, in what was our high school experience? I struggle for it. Is it the moment we die a million little deaths at the hands of our little minds? Are we constantly fighting internal battles that, if they don’t kill you, will cause so much damage as to render you useless?

I ask because high school was a battleground, a war against ourselves we didn’t survive.

I don’t think I ever apologized to her for it.

The endless doctor’s appointments, the medicine scripts, the forms that asked, on a scale of one to five, how much I wanted to die: this was all separate from her and her experience of high school. And yet there I was, in my hospital gown, and I will always be in and out of the institutions that push us further apart.

In there somewhere, in my swirling disaster of a brain, is hope that our relationship can be the future we had dreamed of.

I want her in it. I want a sister, and above all, a warrior to count on in the moments I go under.