Charcoal

I swallowed thirteen pills. One for every year that I’d been alive. It seemed like a lucky number.

My mom made me shove my finger down my throat, which I did. She went back to sleep. I took thirteen more and added one of her muscle relaxers– for luck.

I woke her up. Off to Conway Medical Center we went.

It’s a blur between now and then. There are flashes of my mom lifting my legs into our 2001 Pontiac Montana, a blip of me stumbling through the emergency room parking lot, and fluorescent lights rail-roading above my head as scrubs-clad bodies moved frantically around the hospital bed.

A tube forces its way into my throat. I thought I felt it. But maybe not. The objects in the room melt into one another and the doctors and nurses became a singular entity barking orders and confirmations. Black sludge pushes itself into my body.

As my blinking slows, the images swirled into a void familiar, a listless dreamscape, the somber knowledge of the improvements to be found in my absence, that a loss is not truly a loss, that time heals all wounds– of all this, I am convinced. Across my vision comes a flurry of juvenile faces offering nothing more than bitter accusation, memories of the cuts along my arms, legs, and back made with the knife my mother had been trying to find for weeks, a lonely walk home, a move I never wanted to make, and a box in a little girl's closet filled with presents for when her hero returns.

The scene shifts, unnatural choreography formed within my lulling eye. I see my mother, first fresh faced and young, then weary, then worried, crying in a lonely waiting room, biting the brittle nails she’d worked so hard to grow. I remember, five years prior, when her cousin placed a barrel between his teeth, discovered later by his teenage son. My great-aunt threw herself across the closed coffin, wailing for her baby boy. There was a shrine of him in her home, an aging picture set atop a piano that would never be played again. Was this my fate– a picture hung in a living room, stared at often but discussed little, a too-taut heartstring never to be released?

Slingshot visions pulled me from maternal lamentations and propel me into a place I’d never seen, a place that feels like home, where tiny voices call for me and a calloused hand grazes the length of my cheekbone. I saw my mother’s wrinkled face wash over with peace, and one of the few smiles life allowed her creeping across her cracking lips.

Bright lights come into gentle focus. The medical staff is moving less frantically though the seriousness in their steps remains. The tube is pulled from my throat. I gag, cough, and drift off.

When I wake, my mother is by my side whispering a notion of unconditional love. The doctor comes, informs me of my stability. As discussed, he says, if you tried to do this again, we’d have to watch you for a few days.

Three hours later, two officers appear at my bedside. They clasp my hands and my wrists and escort me to a nearby elevator. As I walk, the metal twists around my ankles. One of the officers takes pity and releases the lower set of cuffs, warning me not to run off. The elevator reaches the bottom floor and the doors open. It is twilight, and there is a police car waiting on the other side of the glass entryway. I’m told to watch my head as I awkwardly shift my body into the backseat.

As the car pulls out of the lot, I think of what I’ve seen and wonder- am I truly to be fixed?