I See Orange
I took the orange pills. In a Simpson's episode, the grandfather figure said they keep you from screaming. I did that in my sleep last night, transforming into someone the old me wouldn't recognize.
I'm in the hospital. Or, I was - not right now, and never in any lucid sense. I was 51/50'd, which the fancy word for saying, there's a cuckoo clock in your head in place of a brain. The old me perhaps wanted to burst out of time itself, and that's why I transformed. I saw the color red as a means to an end, when I was hurting, but in the hospital, everything is stale white, like my heritage and the color of a blank page of writing, where you say everything you don't mean.
They don't allow cell phones in this particular segment of the hospital, so when the nurse said I had a phone call, I got out of bed and hobbled over to the pay phone wall that consumes the front entrance of this man-made hell hole.
My sister's voice was breathy. This was the second my transformation happened. We had just had a huge fight and she was supposed to be pissed - I mean, right? I had blown up at her big party, the one where she gets married.
The breathiness of her voice was followed by a string of words that made my skin burst out of the cocoon of self-preservation I had carefully crafted for myself up until that moment. It was unreal: she said, "There's still room in California for both of us!" "I can't kick you out of the state!"
Up until that moment, I had never died while still alive. This is important because, I think, dear reader, you have never experienced this moment. Imagine your favorite person - the one you love the most - tells you to f*ck off, forever. I went back to my cold hospital cot and thought about how, in my dire moment of being 51/50'd, I had not been in anywhere near this much pain.
This is where you've stopped reading, or want to. There's nothing in this for you. I think, from what I've learned in this life, is that we so seldom relate to other people on the level we hope to.
Here's something you can understand: the click of the line as she hung up. Heartache tears you up from the inside, and the feeling of being gone from her life forever felt as real as the blood pumping into my ears and down my spine, on its way back to what it thinks is home.
The next morning, as I walked home from the hospital, I texted her. Hey, I said. I'm home. She didn't respond. She never would in the same way again.
I think rebirth is shedding all the lining of your old self - like a fur coat that has to be refurbished, with sleeker lining that no one can tell is fake. My personality had just gone through an overhaul, every inch as synthetic. I had slept for two days straight after our phone call. Isn't it funny, how sleeping makes us miss exactly what we intend to miss.
But was it fake, this transformation?
I think arriving home after a stay in the hospital is surreal. Here's this place you lived in before, in the before-times. Now, I looked around and thought about my sanity, how someone once said, "If you don't take care of your mind, where will you live?"
My sister still hasn't forgiven me. But maybe that's not the world the new me is living in. Maybe my transformation, though through the looking glass and down a pay phone cord into the sound of her disappointment, was just for me, so I could come home to the safety net of a brain running on orange pills.