Is how the day ends when you are emotionally labile, completely suggestible and waiting for drugs to take effect, unsure what sort of psychotic you are. And your imagination is in overdrive trying to make sense of a what you have been told was an episode where everyone was a potential threat and the dystopian book you were just reading appears to be, no wait, is in fact  coming true.

I am recovering from a psychotic episode. My first. And am locked up. Alone and agreeing to everything suggested me by staff and family. Two firsts.

“Go for a walk, you say?” Alright, why not?

The ward of thirty something beds is triangular in shape. Someone must have thought the best way to keep the loonies inside was to design like a shopping mall, nothing meets at a right angle, so even less of the physical world makes sense to you.

So a walk around the facility is the suggested activity. How did I used to say, “no”? The only choice is to walk left or right? Left is the way the others walk, except for a young Ethiopian man. That way direct eye contact and confrontation is avoided. It cannot be much different in prison. Indeed some in here speak of murder and of violence to humans as though it were a badge. Scary street cred. games I do not want to play.

There are no people here, just their medications; walking the floor, pacing, arguing loudly, writing on the chalk board or playing music in their rooms. Left or right, those are the choices.

I will walk left. Two circuits a day of about five minutes each. Exercise enough then safely in my room behind my curtain, except for meals.

As a casual weed smoker who used to try to regain control of their sleep due to shift work and bouncing hormones and circadian rhythms none of this makes sense.

Being part of an age and gender cohort which studies show is predisposed to schizophrenia when cannabis is ingested is something that happens to others, not you. I have lost me.

And being detained involuntarily under the Mental Health Act, even when I offered to go quietly, voluntarily to avoid a negative health record- you are psychotic the doctor said, so you cannot give consent now anyway – is completely down to the parent who tricked you into going to the A and E department late at night and without the protection of even a kitchen knife. One minute a protective parent, next thing they turned and gave enough information, my private information, to have me incarcerated against my will.

Maybe I should have waited it out at home and if as they say, the police had come, they could have been part of the problem as well. Instead I am here now a week. At least I can say my name.

Terrified to sleep, needing pills for that as well, and having to stand in front of the glass wall of the nurses’ station along with everyone else with a need from pain relief to blankets to money for the bus, (what bus?), waiting to ask nursing staff for the sleeping pill which they forgot to include in my meds, and having to prove that I haven’t already had it dispensed me.

And completely unable to get any eye contact or gauge the level of illness or hostility toward me from my roommate who appears to have a bikie background, big boots and speaking of sleeping rough. Hiding my belongings while I sleep. And necessary after the staff gave away my mobile phone, taken on admission for safe-keeping and to “assist in the settling-in process”, my only contact with the friends and the outside, other world, to a discharging patient. Why should I or how can I trust what anyone says in here? What is real and what is story? Police say the person who has the phone is a bad egg. What are they doing with it?

I will walk to the left. So along the passage past the electric linen cupboard, the guest toilets, the scuffed and damaged walls where there is a slight change of direction, past the television lounge, the pool table with the same people watching and the same one person playing, the TV emitting varying levels of static according to whether the compressor cooling the Coke machine in the corner is running. The compressor always comes on during the news. Presumably because the news is hardest to fudge.

I read a newspaper and have given it to my parent to take home for safe-keeping from everyone else it is so dangerous. If what is written there gets out, expect pandemonium in the streets and dystopian novels will come true. The same goes for the “Rich Dad” self-help book they left me. I think that there is not much wrong with the chess set.

Past the lounge is the dining room. Locked at other times, it took me no time to eat my lunch today, but ages to eat the pavlova with strawberries. It came from the staff lunch area, they top up by lining up with us, and this seemed only fair. But these are the staff who give wrong medication, did not get me a doctor appointment these last five days in spite of repeated asking and telling them I am fine and just need to go home so that this locked-in environment can stop making me sick, and the same staff who gave away my phone and did nothing when one of the more aggressive men took my hat off my head saying it was his own.

The strawberries may have been poisoned. I ate them, chewed and tasted poison and put it back on my plate. It looked fine and the taste went away. I took the same spoonful up again, and again had to spit it back out. After the fourth time they tasted OK. I swallowed. A great leap of faith. Or resignation. I don’t really know. People were watching me. Looking. Staff said I have to take lunch with the group. It seems to be a marker of wellness so I don’t take my meals back to my room even though no-one objects to this. The medication makes me hungry. I am always hungry now.

The dietician has prescribed, if that is the right word, extra food and a daily, afternoon milk drink. I have to remember to ask twice a day and sometimes they come, sometimes not. Only my allocated nurse can get the extra food and its kept in a distant and strange place, or so it seems. They take forever to bring it and sometimes it never comes anyway. The night nurse suggests that staff get hungry too. I have no idea what this means.

After the dining room is the craft room. There we take turns to colour in. It is wonderful and amazing. A week ago I was completing a law degree, now I can almost stay within the lines and some of it is truly wonderful colouring, like a stained glass window the finished birds and scenery bring a brightness no-one else sees or feels like I do.

Through the craft room is the triangular court-yard where the architect’s design suddenly unravels and you can guess the overall layout. There is an open roof section with grass. The grass succumbs to pacing and cigarette butts. Nicotine potentiates some anti-pyschotic medication. This is a much bigger thing than the full moon furphies. Six months ago, hospital policy forbad smoking in all government buildings. Now staff are of two camps. Prohibition or Look-Away. The grass suggests the Look-Aways are winning.

There is a man pacing one side of the court-yard. Muttering, looking down, brows mono. Just walk to one side and there is the tea and coffee area. The water is set at a safe, tepid number of degrees. The tea bags float on the surface, clinging to the side of the polystyrene cups. But today’s allocation is gone. No tea or coffee to be had. Just a brown and white pile of tags, plastic and wooden stirrers. Not even a sugar sachet. A woman reclines on a couch nearby eyes brown and bleak. A rug around her shoulders although it must be thirty degrees. No acknowledgement. I don’t exist here.

Through the tea and coffee station there is a short walk following the lino edge to a t-intersection. Right to the nurses station, left to the long corridor to the room. Back to the room. The room with a hospital curtain that stops at knee height around each bed. The gracious Ethopian talking in years of travel and not medical history when asked how he comes to be here.

Which “here” indeed? My parent has gone home without me. The nurse is come with my evening medication. (Yes, I can confirm my name and say it together with my date of birth; (how can this matter to anyone or provide any OH and S safeguard when I am here involuntarily and reliably- unreliably?- mad?). It must be eight o’clock. Time to sleep. This time they have brought both pills and there is no debate or argument needed about whether there was prescribed a sleeping pill, whether I will need one tonight as the chart shows such great progress and the main drug is recommended for review, (how should I know?) I cannot argue anything. From a front-on attack such as this I have no defences. I just know they will find me awake on the fifteen-minute, visual check rounds which happen every hour or so. All night unless I have a sleeping pill.

Here there are no reference points, and still no sleep. If I can’t sleep I can’t get well. I need to get out. These people, this atmosphere, is making me more unwell by the day. I was never this bad on admission, not even during the twenty hours in A and E waiting for assessment. There is no way out. I am not sure what outside looks like any more. The book is come true, traffic is grid-locked, people are hoarding, the madness is come.

My wallet is safe in my pillow, my iPod in my pants pocket. I will wear everything to bed. Shoes under the bed, pointed to the door ready to slip on, socks on my feet. I smell of stale food. And fear. Tomorrow I might find a way to take my clothes off and trust long enough to shower.

Good night.

They walked across the road to the shore to see the first of the magnificent 6-mast refugee ships sailing in from afar. A local boy’s sunglasses reflected the many colourful flags that flew from the lines that cascaded down from the ship’s masts. These flags were evidence of the many countries that had contributed to this world changing event. They had come from all over, sailing seas from many regions of middle earth, of where it seemed no area had been spared from inhuman atrocities.

The first time refugees tried to flee their war torn lands, was many years earlier, in boats, which at the time created no end of political and public attention of mixed support. Attention that never seemed to find an effective solution. However, the occupants of these ‘ships’ could now reflect on the great international fuss that eventually directed positive efforts to save them and resolve a worldwide dilemma. These large refugee ships had replaced years of refugee boats that usually sank, causing even greater hardship for those on board. These magnificent 6-mast ships now provided comfortable safe transport with time along the way to legally process all on board before reaching their new homes.

“I recognise you from the tellie!” a young boy shouted with excitement from the shore, “you are the people who are coming to live with us!” His nearby friend, the little girl next door, was also excited, having spent much of her time preparing for their arrival. She found the bike she had almost forget she owned, and after many hours of cleaning and polishing, it was ready for her to give to one of her new friends. Friends, she was sure, would be many.

The ship docked. It began to rain. Rain was a new experience for many of the refugees, especially the children, who had travelled from far away desert lands. The rain was symbolic of washing away a sad past. And after the rain came the sun and a bright new future.

She looks at me & I shy away,

Scared of her strength & what she’ll say.

She means no harm, but intimidates just the same,

She clearly has mastered, this whole life-game.

“I wish I was her,” I wonder with lust,

“Be confident” I affirm. “I must, I must.”

Her ears prick & a smile breaks free,

“You’ve got this Woman.” She is Me.

Written by Jodie Hebrard

Writer | Occasional Poet | Full-time Woman

https://www.facebook.com/JodieHebrardWriter/

Kath’s upstairs neighbour Marge was celestial in both size and age. Decades of self-indulgence had left her fleshy and diabetic but high-spirited in a manner that reflected a life of having one’s cake and eating it. Her enormous laugh echoed regularly through the rooms of the small house she moved to once Terry died, although her eyes no longer twinkled like stars ablaze in the country sky.

So generous was her body that she claimed to find clothes constricting and regularly tossed them aside in favour of celebrating fresh air. It was often that we would find her cooking up a storm in her small kitchen wearing nothing but an apron, her white, naked bum wobbling as the wooden spoon clanged around the bowl. Kath was mortified the first time it happened but it soon became our joke: full moon Marge was out again. We stopped knocking on her door when we ambled upstairs to visit. She didn’t give a fuck and neither did we. We would all shimmy through the kitchen, singing Nina Simone and pinching morsels of high-fat, high-carb high-sugar treats as quickly as Marge could whip them up.

It was in this same state of undress that Marge first dropped the wooden spoon, first clutched at her shoulder, first collapsed to the floor in a moaning heap. While I called for help, Kath tried in vain to force Marge’s mass into a dress. But Marge, in pain and fear, was unyielding. As the paramedics arrived we looped another apron, Terry’s before he’d died, over her neck and down her back to cover that majestic moon and match the one obscuring her front.

Marge never quite understood how I came to live with Kath. “But where do you sleep?” she asked again and again. Again and again I explained, “I sleep in her bed, Marge”. I was intermittently patient and irritated with her old-fashioned question, “We sleep together.” No matter how I responded, with gentleness or annoyance it did not change the frequency of the question; she never moved beyond her amused befuddlement. “You girls must be very good friends,” she would say and laugh her enormous laugh, her jowls and breasts and arms shaking. Sometimes she would scold us, “if you don’t find a man soon you’ll have to marry each other”. “That’s the plan,” Kath would respond cheekily, kissing me on the head. Marge loved that one, slapping her legs and roaring with glee at the idea – the idea! – of two girls in white dresses and veils meeting at the alter and exchanging surnames.

The second time her heart stopped it stopped forever. We saw the stretcher pass our window and wondered if they’d found her in a dignified position. It was doubtful, we decided. She wasn’t a very dignified woman. A few days later, Marge’s middle-aged son rapped on the door. “These are for you,” he told us, pushing a plastic bag into Kath’s hands, “Mum always said she wanted you girls to have them.” We chatted for a moment or two, said our sorries and shut the door. When we untied the plastic handles we saw the folded aprons, neatly embroidered, Margery and Terrence. We hung them on a hook in our kitchen and wondered why.

When we married, we played Nina Simone as we walked, hand-in-hand, down the grassy patch between the lawn chairs. We both wore colour and we kept our last names.

I haven’t written by hand for the longest time. A signature here and there, the occasional note in a card but nothing of substance. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten how hard it is. But here I am, just a few sentences in and my hand already aches. Years of typing and texting have reduced my muscles to untrained strugglers. For someone who makes a living from the written word it’s galling to feel your body actively rebel against the act of writing.

I’ve simply fallen into the habit of using the computer or my phone to express my thoughts. Typing has become a part of my writing habit. But the act of writing reminds me of the rewards of putting pen to page. Anyone who says writing is easy is full of shit. It’s fucking hard. Like pulling teeth. Writing by hand is a physical expression of that struggle.

My hand is relatively neat, mostly legible but the act of writing has never been easy. Being left handed brings a certain awkwardness, means you write around your own words, but that isn’t the issue. I write with a heavy hand, a script that hurts. It’s an ache that makes me want to stop writing. But I can’t stop yet, there are so many things still to say.

That writing will have to wait because these scribbles, scratched by hand, record the moment I rediscovered the joy of the act of putting ink to the page.

Rees Quilford is on twitter at @destinationq and occasionally blogs at www.destinationq.com.au.

The mosaic of life got shattered into 1000000 pieces but one large piece was in between whole and happy – my work which you can find under  www.naturesartmelbourne.etsy.com