Dear Former Hospital Bed,

 

When I first laid my eyes on you

My 13 year old wings were clipped

Clipped to my grungy grey converse without their fading laces- clipped to my the fibers of my loose jeans with noticeable empty belt loops

 

You were a navy blue plastic mattress

Settled neatly on a pale wooden frame

Nestled between walls with ominous scratches painted over

Right under a ceiling that I was quickly told by a nurse was

“Too high to hang myself by”

 

To a passerby you looked like

A barren dorm room

 

But there aren’t too many passersby in the lobby

Of a mental rehab center

 

I spent what felt like years near you,

Under your thin sheets, clutching your pillows as shields against the darkness crawling into the

Edges of my vision

 

You taught me how excruciatingly difficult it is to watch your mother

Attempt to make you when your skin is state issued  

You swaddled me as I chuckled over the darkly comical nature of watching the metal detector run over my sandwich because the cheese

Could be too sharp

 

You would beckon me to the alleyway between hell and numbness and would allow my organs to brew

in a crescendoing silence

I’d shave my thoughts away under the wool blanket

Tinged with grey and holes and whispers of

“Hey are you awake”

opalescent flashlights beams, begging the hours to come closer because I was afraid of daybreak

Wasn’t I supposed to come out of your blanketed arms anew?

Reimagined? Anything other than I was crawling?

 

I would sit on your edge swinging my under medicated trembling limbs in the empty darkness

   You were my reward for not slitting my ribs with blunt blades, my reward for sleeping under the lights that would bore holes into my skull in the lobby, my reward for confessing that I had been measuring just how long I could withstand not eating

You held the bodies of the broken and the misled, in a nest of years and tears

and behavior worksheets

 

When I gathered all my things for what I believed was my final encapsulated day

I found you naked

No sheets or blankets and I have to say

It was oddly disturbing

I had a primal urge to throw all my dirty t-shirts and stubby eyeliners, spread them out onto

the slick plastic of your artificial bones

I didn’t know I could feel stripped as well

I had adapted you as part of my identity and my 13 year old self was so utterly convinced that I was destined to feel alone and worthless, numb to all emotions

 

how humorous I find these sentiments now

 

Yet, there are still grey afternoons where I find myself still in your embrace, even though you’re 28 miles away

Shrouded in eight lane highways and tucked in the promise of healing

And that is because in a small corner of me I still crave that silent proclamation of naivety, the soft stability of a chart and a number assigned to me

I think I like to paint it better now than when I walked in

 

I still have the moss green folder I’d slip beside you and me

Today I opened it and I swear it all rushed back to me

I was 13 again wishing my life over

Clinging to you all the same

 

Dear Former Hospital Bed, I hope this letter finds you another holding soul ,

Bringing comfort and heartbreak simultaneously

Although our circumstances were less than pleasant

I hope you know there is a still a small piece of my soul that is intertwined in those sheets

As you are in mine