The Storm Rages from The Heart

Part three of three.

I started writing this after I got two bills. One was for the ambulance ride, which took me to the hospital immediately after the police got finished assessing the situation. The other was for a collection of drug tests, which I never agreed to taking.

When I arrived at the hospital, I was going through a strange sense of euphoria. Everything looked so funny, so I could only sing a happy song and whistle. I wasn't quite sure of what was happening, but it didn't matter anymore. It seemed like nothing was real, anyways.

But the sense of euphoria eventually dissipated, and I was left with a somewhat surrealistic reality. Every waking moment seemed like an eternity. I was stuck there for three days. You have not seen how long eternity is until you've waited in a hospital without any form of entertainment, idle task, visitors, or anything.

The doctor was an asshole. I only saw him for about three minutes, and he decided that I was suicidal and needed to go to the psychiatric hospital.

Why did the doctor say I was suicidal? Because my father told the police I was. The police gave their paperwork (with a wildly different summary of the event then I [or I could even imagine my father] could have ever imagined), and so he said I was suicidal, although he wasn't qualified to say so. The psychiatric hospital trusted the quack and said I was suicidal, too.

I arrived at the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital sometime in the middle of the night. The people were nice enough; I thought it wouldn't be too bad. I'd seen crazy people before; they're not as terrible as people think they are. I was placed in an observational unit, where they would decide what to do with me. I stayed there for three or four days.

All in all, it wasn't too bad. Or maybe it was terrible. I can't really tell. It got better when I left the observational unit, anyways.

The unit was essentially a triangular room with lots of rather uncomfortable and unusually-stained upholstered chairs facing a television. Along the legs of the triangle were rooms, two occupants each and with a shelf and desk with built-in chair in each room, beside the beds of vynal with extremely hard pillows of the same substance. The hypotenous had a little annex where the doctors talked to the patients, a hallway accessable to staff alone, a telephone for everyone's use, and two constantly locked bathrooms. God forbid we pee without others' attention.

They didn't let me keep any of my things (they were 'unsafe'), not even my belt or mismatched shoes. I walked around barefoot until someone brought me a pair of socks. They took away my cell phone, but at least they let me copy my numbers out from them.

So, yeah. I stayed there for a few days. I called everyone I could (my cell phone didn't have the numbers of everyone I knew, unfortunately) during that time. I called Yaken and told him what happened - which, in retrospect, seems like an extremely bad idea. I called him a few times while I was in the ICU (the term the staff used for the observational unit). I even made plans to go out with him again after I figured I'd get out. I called Julie (a friend to the family), too, and she ended up getting loud and upset after I told her my story, simply because nobody is supposed to be capable of such bigeoted, block-headed, inflexable idiocy. I also called Lauren, who was somewhat sombre about the whole thing. At least, I think she was. I'm not sure.

So those few days passed relatively quickly. I was prescribed Addiman and Ambien (the combination is the quintessential cure-all of psychologists), as-needed. I couldn't sleep on that vynal mattress without the Ambien, so I took that every night. Then, I recieved my 'legal 2000 papers', which were esentially a court summons. They were trying to declare me insane.

This, of course, gave me waves of paroxysms of an unnummerable number of emotions. I cried, and I would have yelled out if I were able to breathe.

So I was brought into unit H4B. It was identical to the ICU, but with more unusual stains on the seats, and people peed on the toilet seats. 'People', as in more then one.

My roommate was douglas, a somewhat slow OCD-suffering nymphomaniac. I'm not kidding when I say that he constantly masturbated. Often when I was in there.

That's not the worst of it. Before I even got there, the janitor threw all the papers I had away. This included the paper that had my phone numbers.

Yaken was now unreachable.

I was depressed and distraught nearly constantly. I cried most nights. Simply because I couldn't call him and tell him I couldn't come for the date. Which was terrible, because I still felt like I owed him something special for that cab fare he paid for me.

At the advice of the most sane-looking of people in the unit (one who had been admitted because of simelar circumstances to my own), I signed a paper which essentially said that I was there volentarily, so I didn't have to go to court, which would, he said, have made me stay longer even if I weren't stripped of my rights.

Ironically, he ended up having another crisis, overreacting, breaking a window with a chair, and being taken away.

I won't go into any more details, mostly for the purpose of brevity. The summary is that my uncle saw me (I finally told him I was gay, which was suprising even for me), he brought me some things from home (mainly another change of clothes, but also a 1138 page book that I finished the second day of reading), and after a long time of consideration, I accepted my grandparents' offer to live with them, in California.

I was already in Chino Hills by the time I got to tell Yaken that I was leaving. I was already there.

So now we don't even know eachother anymore.

I can't even express how terrible an experiance this was, so I won't even try. I will say, though, that the most terrible thing to lose is an opritunity for happiness. It will cause you to have the most pure sense of unhappiness that you can ever experiance.

Well, I'm at a lack of words, so I'll just wrap this up.

Is the storm of events that started from my father's hate over? I can't say for sure, but the bills I recieved tend to suggest not. The good news, however, is that storms are supposed to be the sign of ecological change. Perhaps it means happiness in my future?

... That's bullshit. I don't believe it. Nothing has changed. only the pretences. It's like being throwm back into the past. I'm still unemployed, I'm still dependant on others, and I'm still not going anywhere. And now I'm lonely again.