Hospital Bed Crawl

I can’t write about the hospital anymore, but I can dream about it. There is a circular room with many open doors, doors opened according to the behavior of the patient. Shut if the room is vacant, cracked if the inhabitant is docile, wide open if the inhabitant is disruptive or dangerous.

There is a nurse standing over me and all I can see are the undersides of her fleshy breasts. They jiggle as she asks me why I started harming myself. They shake as she convinces me of an initial incident my mind has somehow suppressed to protect me. They knock me sideways off my chair when I call her a liar.

There are gnarled scars cutting up and down brown arms from glass liquor bottles, lamps, drunken father fists, abusive boyfriend knuckles. Under dirty tee shirts Native girls hide three-month lumps from dad’s best friend rape. And scars from earnest knives digging to find that bastard child growing.

She is razor blade thin from the coke and she is pregnant with her second child. She is starving her bastard baby. They think it’s something mental, anorexia. They don’t realize it’s less painful than the knives. I offer to push her down the stairs. She looks at me, eyes full of tears, “Could you?”

There is a boy who does not know his real father, who cuts himself to numb the pain of mom’s boyfriend beatings, who smuggles plastic utensils from meals and sharpens them in his room, who cuts himself right on the wrists to be found out. He wants to be found out. He gets more freedom in a place where he isn’t allowed to wear shoes than he does at home. He will do anything to stay and I look at the cut on my forearm the nurses told me should have had stitches and hate myself even more.

There is me crying softly into a pillow I wonder how many girls before me have dampened in this same way. I wonder if they cried softly too so the others wouldn’t hear, call them a weak white bitch in the morning. And were they crying because they knew their life would never get to the point where they would throw chairs just to stay in that place for a few more days? Crying because they knew they’ll never stop bleeding. They won’t stop because it’s the only thing they can do right. They won’t stop because it is the only time they feel their strength.