(The beginning of a possible new poetry project, that may or may not happen, about places and me)
(CW: Eating disorders, inpatient treatment)
There’s six weeks and a whitewashed building with eyes in every wall and locks on every door. There’s no space to move in and so much time to fill – boxes of time to stuff with polystyrene peanuts and meaningful activities and pink lady apples and jam pots and Muller Thick and Creamy yoghurts and wraps stuffed with pesto and Quorn chunks and salad and lemon and garlic mayo. You’ve got to make everything it count; you’ve got to fill every gap.
Everything matters in the whitewashed building from whether you choose custard or ice cream or what you do when you sit at your desk. Everything matters and all is recorded, your whole self sketched out on paper charts. You’re never, never alone here, never un-watched: footsteps outside your room, someone cry-screaming down the corridor, Watermelon Sugar playing in the dining room for the sixteenth time that day, someone at your ear: scrape your plate, not too fast now, not too slow, MEDICATION!! MEDICATION!!
There are eyes and spies in every wall and you can’t get in and you can’t get out. It’s nearing the end of June and the summer is full of promises that you won’t be able to keep. You’re under observation right down to your blood and your bowels and your sleep and then it’s a Wednesday and it’s ward round and you ask for a moment to breathe, a moment of space, and impossibly, the answer is yes.
You don’t believe it until you step out of the whitewashed building and the door locks behind you. The air is hot and the sky is as blue as it ought to be on a day like this and your legs feel new and you’ve got a taste in your mouth that’s different from the jam and the cornflakes and the milk and the potato salad – it tastes like being alive, kind of fizzy – it tastes like being alone – it melts on the tongue – it’s being so completely alone that anything you do now cannot be written down as evidence.
You slip your earphones in and walk to the park. Up the hill, though the gates and everything is green and grey and blue and there are people, alive and healthy, people doing normal people things and you’d almost forgotten how that looked amid the easy sliding, amid the losing, between all the eating and the hurting and the watching. This, you understand, as you walk the circuit, see the stagnant pond, the taped off playground, the yellowing grass, and the ice cream sign – this is what freedom will always feel like: June at midday, a commonplace park and utter aloneness.
In ten minutes time, you’ll have to return to the whitewashed building, back to the eyes, back to the charts, but you’ll know: the park is there, and you will go back – you’ll look at life and the living again, pretend you’re not a sick person anymore. You’ll know that you’ll live each day in anticipation for those moments – cling to them, store them up, pin your whole day on them.
Call it light in the dark, call it silver lining, call it escaping the sick house for thirty minutes. Call it whatever. Just remember, later, your birthday, remember the picnic, remember reading a letter to your future self, remember the sun and the swings, remember believing that things could possibly get better. Remember the park and everything that happened and when it feels bad, just remember how good freedom and hope can taste.