Orange. Maybe closer to brown. Somewhere in between. Burnt umber, according to the Crayola Corporation.
All the walls are like this here. Lime green, if the lime is overripe. Sky blue, and oppressively cloudless. A combination of bright and neutral. Soothing by design. Don't want to have anything that might disturb the nutjobs.
But here, in my room, orange. Two toned orange. The color of puke from someone who's eaten too many fruit-flavored Pop Tarts. Not soothing. Disturbing.
Or maybe it's just me. I'm the disturbed one, right? I've got the scars on my wrist to prove it. Colors that are interesting might somehow angry up my blood, make me want to harm myself. Not that it would be easy to do that around here. They won't even let me have a plastic fork unless I'm supervised. Can't even have a can of instant pudding because it has sharp edges.
But hey, I can have books. No sharpened pencils for me, but they didn't have a problem with my mom bringing in a copy of Naked Lunch, which, let's face it, seem like the most cliched book a suicidal young man could be reading. Maybe I should read one of the books they have in the day room, old Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins potboilers, or one of the eighty million Harlequin Romances. It might be nice to know what normal people like. If there are such things as normal people.
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The windows in the day room face east. The blinds are up, and morning light floods the room. Then again, even with the blinds down, the lemon-yellow walls are clearly meant to induce some kind of fake cheer. But it doesn't work like that. When you're depressed, a perfect sunny day is just something to be endured. The few people who are out sit in chairs as far from the windows as possible.
I seem to be one of the younger people here. No sign of that cute girl I saw last night, the one I almost certainly won't talk to, because that would mean talking to someone, and I don't do that. But that guy who looks kinda like Sean Penn in Bad Boys, he's here, still strutting around like he's waiting for his closeup. Most of the people are in their thirties and forties, lost in themselves, making occasional small talk with the attendants but never interacting with each other.
The TV is tuned to Good Morning, America. I'd turn it over to cartoons, but that's probably discouraged. If we saw Jerry whack Tom with a pool cue, it might give us bad ideas. My first morning here, and I feel like I've been here for years.
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Mom called last night, and asked if I'd watched the first episode of some new Earl Hamner-created TV series about young kids volunteering in a senior citizen home. No, I hadn't seen it.
"Well, if you're still there next week, all of you should watch. It's so nauseatingly sweet, it'll make you all mad. You can form discussion groups and talk about how much you hate it."
So, summing up: My mother phones her son in the psych ward for no better reason than to complain about a horrible TV show she watched.
Yeah, we're definitely related.
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I made a reference to Zelig during my counseling session this morning, and my therapist actually knew what I was talking about. She even seemed to appreciate it, and I was encouraged, so I told her I wanted to make other semi-brainy references so she'd like me more, and I'd fit in, and I wanted be the depressed loser I am. Then she asked me if I'd always felt like that around other people.
No, I said. It was a joke. Another Zelig reference. Ugh. Jokes never work when you have to explain them.
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There's a dry-erase board in the dayroom and every day a new stupid homily/affirmation/line of bullshit is written on it. Today's bit of wisdom is this: "A comfort zone is relaxing, but nothing ever grows there."
What the hell? OK, first of all, that's just stupid on the face of it. So we shouldn't do what we're comfortable with, what we're good at? Joe Namath's entire post-football career is a strong argument against that. And did anybody ever watch a Marx Brothers movie and think, yeah, these guys need to do some heavy drama?
But more importantly...what the hell does that have to do with me, or anybody in this ward? Comfort zone? I cut my fucking wrists a few days ago. I don't feel comfortable anywhere. I would kill just for the chance to have a comfort zone. I don't know what it's like. Maybe I will someday, but I doubt that I'll get there if the best you can offer me by way of a cure is meaningless catch phrases and bright colors.
I go back to my room, to the burnt umber walls and scribbled notepads, and I stare out the window. There are trees and grass and sunshine, and it all looks like some alien world to me.
